“Carpe Infans! Beware Babies There is no other human so seductive that an otherwise rational human will feed, clothe, sit up nights, work trigonometry with, bake cookies for, and generally tolerate for such long extents of time for such paltry returns of goods and services. They are a trap for the unwary ... all of us.”
“We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal.”
“It felt like so many years worth of anxiety and worry were trying to escape all at once—maybe like an emotional volcano, only my mom and dad, they didn t run away to save themselves but sprinted right into my lava. They both jumped up off the couch and wrapped their arms around me even though it meant touching each other. We stayed like that for a long time, and it felt good—almost enough to justify everything that had precipitated it, but not quite.”
“The best part, though, was hearing my mother s voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I ve found. You wouldn t think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world s titled, and there s an end to it.”
“You do what you can, he said, after seconds of silence had stretched to a minute, to make sure your kids are safe. From the second they re born... He stared at the lines of Nightshade s face, the ordinariness of it. You want to protect them. From every skinned knee, from hurt feelings and punk kids who push smaller ones into the dirt, form the worst parts of yourself and the worst parts of this world.”
“the toilet is an intimacy only shared with parents when you are young and once again when they are older and with lovers when say on a Sunday morning stretching into the bathroom you wake to the sound of stream into bowl and go to hug the naked body stood with its back to you and kiss the neck and taste the whole of the night on there and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss and take the whole of him in your hand and feel the water moving through him and knowing that this is love the prone flesh what we expel from the body and what we let inside”
“The next my parents and Brianna come rollin up in here, I m gonna scream, Hey! Why don t y all just MOVE IN?!”
“A strange thing has happened as I ve aged; I have felt my parents love for me more strongly every year.”
“The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.”
“It was nice to call my parents and proudly tell them, My lady garden is going viral. In hindsight, that may have been a poor choice of phrasing.”
“It is a sign of immaturity to believe that being older than someone (automatically) makes you more (mentally) mature than them.”
“You can t claim to care about the welfare of children if you re shaming other parents for the choices they re making.”
“I have heard people say love is weak but they re wrong--love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things--patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love--the epic and the small, the noble and the base--the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.”
“How to advise parents for being successful in raising children still remains an important unsolved problem.”
“-¿Se te ha ocurrido alguna vez -preguntó, de pronto- que los padres no son más que niños grandes hasta que sus hijos les fuerzan a hacerse adultos? ¿Lo que generalmente ocurre entre los gritos y los pataleos de estos?”
“ “I’m going to meet your parents this weekend and we’ve got plans?” Her face reddened. “Sorry. I, um, assumed that, you know, that since you said I was yours, that we would kind of, I guess …” Damn, she was cute when she stammered.”
“I m sorry. For all of us. Sorry for all the little ways the people who were supposed to love us most could hurt us so deeply, despite their shared heritage and blood, as thought their knowledge of our pasts gave them unlimited access to all the most tender places, the old wounds that could be so easily reopened with no more than a glance, a comment, a passing reminder of all the ways in which we failed to live up to their expectations.”