“One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents sadness in your eyes.”
“You ll stay with me? Until the very end, said James.”
“You re not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.”
“I look at him and realize, maybe I overreacted. Maybe more than once.”
“Don t be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It s the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.”
“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
“When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.”
“Parents are not interested in justice, they re interested in peace and quiet.”
“It never gets easier, missing you. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.”
“...when your child dies, you feel everything you d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that s written about mourning is all the same, and it s all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same. But here s what no one says - when it s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come. Ah, you tell yourself, it s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
“If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can t buy you clothes, they re so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you--if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune. If you have two parents who love you? You have won life s Lotto. If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine. It s not ideal because it s harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that s all.”
“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
“My parents are going to kill me! That seems rather harsh...”
“Parents had some kind of sin radar, Claire thought. They always called when you were in the middle of something you just knew they d consider wrong. Or at least risky.”
“Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not. That s completely asinine. The truth is that adults love in different ways, not the only way.”
“When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn t go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.”
“Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.”