“I remember the big gaping hole left by my dad’s absence in the months following the accident. He’d been the one who went to my parent-teacher conferences, the one who taught me mnemonics to memorize the Great Lakes and the Earth’s atmospheres. Whenever I did something silly, my dad always made me feel better by telling me a story from the firehouse about someone who had done something even sillier. Sometimes you don’t realize all the things a person does for you until they aren’t there to do them anymore.”
“I m sure my parents must be proud. Or horrified. Or are bitterly arguing about whether they re proud or horrified, and have already hired lawyers to resolve the dispute. -Hayden Upchurch”
“Eventually, many years later, I came to see him the way everyone else saw him—a nice guy who, despite all the damage he did to us, wasn’t a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn’t very bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and lost, people not only liked him, they protected him. My mother, despite her poverty, left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her. And that was another difference between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions of food stamps.”
“I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I ve tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as bad heart always to him refer, And cancer of the pancreas to her.”
“Strict parents create sneaky kids.”
“...but oh, it would just break your heart to see some of them waiting for their visitors. They get their hair all done up on Saturday, and on Sunday morning they get themselves all dressed and ready, and after all that, nobody comes to see them. I feel so bad, but what can you do? Having children is no guarantee that you ll get visitors . . . No, it isn t.”
“My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?”
“Y all know how much I love you? Infinity and back again, I say the way I ve said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, go on and add a little bit more to that.”
“If parents don’t want to hear the truth, children learn not to speak it.”
“Why aren t you girls out stealing hubcaps or shoplifting like normal children?”
“Don t let what your parents do disappoint you.”
“There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn t, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn t, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.”
“When the Indians saw us whipping our children, they thought at first that we must hate our children, but then they thought, no, no one can hate his child. They decided it must be a religious rite, to make the child hate this world and long for the next. We re a strange vicious people.”
“Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.”
“Of course, to be fair, that was a parent s job. The world was so full of sharp bends that if they didn t put a few twists in you, you wouldn t stand a chance of fitting in.”
“Children imitate their parents, employees their managers.”
“There was no point in telling my father. He d never let me quit after only one day. He couldn t help me and he d make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.”