“For children, parents are a yardstick for normalcy.”
“The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.”
“I sit on my bed and think about Nader McMillan and wonder what I’m going to do. Ignore him. Stand up to him. Avoid him. Be “tough.” I think of the stuff Dad has said over the years. How he finally gave up suggesting things. Why are you asking me this? I never figured out what to do about my own bullies. How am I supposed to know what to do with yours?”
“It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.”
“It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they d had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.”
“The outcome of insane parents is either a murderer or an intellectual.”
“You know what I mean. I m telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn t have the time to be a good parent. Obviously, that s not it. Because you and I, we re both...wealthy in love.”
“I don t think it matters how many parents you ve got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.”
“At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.”
“I don t think it matters how many parents you ve got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.”
“There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one s parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one s parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year s frost forces it up a little higher.”
“My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That s what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.”
“But wasn t there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn t seem fair.”
“My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother, she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps that a cat. As a result, I ve always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me.”
“When her mother combed Harriet s hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn t pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. They both agreed that such a place was unsafe. Hotels were better.”
“Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness. I didn t realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone s parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.”
“No one can escape slavery; we are all slaves in some regards. We are slaves to our parent s expectations. We are slaves to the pressures of our peers. We are slaves to our own ideologies and faiths.”