“Sorry to disappoint you, parents - but when your kids come out as gay, bi or transgender, it is not about you.”
“It s amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my parents would say we should stop having this public discussion .”
“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college,”
“Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you re young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That s positive reinforcement for negative behavior.”
“The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them. It’s for their own good.”
“No matter how far we come, our parents are always in us.”
“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don t do it--she s the wrong woman, he s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”
“What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be”
“There s nothing like your mother s sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.”
“Just because your father s present, doesn t mean he isn t absent.”
“We don t always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can t find a way to love us anyway.”
“Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don t care if they re sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.”
“But I m learning it s human nature to want the things you can t have. What changes is how you go about pursuing the things you want. When you re a little kid and you re told no, you scream and throw a temper tantrum. When you re a teenager and your parents tell you no, you re old enough to internalize your temper tantrum. But you re smarter and you re sneakier this time around. So you nod and act like you care when they say no, when they tell you who you can be friends with, when they say the know what s best. But then you go behind their backs to do it anyway. Because at some point, you need to start calling the shots. At some point, you need to start believing you know whats best. Or, I thought with a smile, you just stop asking for their permission in the first place.”
“As I saw it, all my mother s life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn t seem a significant change.”
“Oh, Daja, moaned Jory, you sound just like my parents. She ran from the schoolroom. Well, there s no reason to insult me, muttered Daja, half offended.”
“Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life.”
“Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes...”