124 Inspiring Quotes For Parents

Parenting is a journey filled with countless moments of joy, challenges, and growth. It's a path where guidance is often found in the wisdom of those who have walked it before us. Whether you're seeking encouragement, a fresh perspective, or a gentle reminder of the profound impact parents have, the right words can be incredibly powerful. In this collection, we bring together 124 inspiring quotes that capture the essence of parenthood, offering reflections that resonate with the heart and soul of every parent. Let these words serve as a source of motivation and comfort as you navigate the complexities and wonders of raising the next generation.

1. “It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.” - Katherine Min

2. “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” - Oscar Wilde

3. “You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.” - Alice Munro

4. “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.” - Christopher Moore

5. “Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” - Lemony Snicket

6. “Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!” - Alexander McCall Smith

7. “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".” - Jordan Sonnenblick

8. “Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.” - Debra Ginsberg

9. “You'll stay with me?'Until the very end,' said James.” - J. K. Rowling

10. “My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.” - Anne Fadiman

11. “My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.” - Anne Fadiman

12. “I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.” - Stephen King

13. “If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.” - Mark Glamack

14. “I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.” - Mitch Albom

15. “Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college,” - Woody Allen

16. “I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.” - David Foster Wallace

17. “In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.” - Herodotus

18. “It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.” - Roald Dahl

19. “Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?” - Lorrie Moore

20. “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” - Charles Taylor

21. “Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.” - John Updike

22. “For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.” - E.M. Forster

23. “That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots. ” - Emily Perkins

24. “The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life.” - Steve Maraboli

25. “The VoiceThere is a voice inside of youThat whispers all day long,"I feel this is right for me,I know that this is wrong."No teacher, preacher, parent, friendOr wise man can decideWhat's right for you--just listen toThe voice that speaks inside.” - Shel Silverstein

26. “My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.” - Michael Palin

27. “My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories.” - Myron Uhlberg

28. “In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.” - Beryl Markham

29. “Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

30. “Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.” - Chuck Palahniuk

31. “I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.” - Sherman Alexie

32. “Little tree filled his lungs with the white airness of the night, as if he were going to fly. The living voice of his parents. Elisha's eyes. These were reasons enough to set off on another adventure.Reasons to be Toby Lolness again.” - Timothee de Fombelle

33. “My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different values derived from different cultures and wouldn't agree on certain issues, they were good people, incredible people, and I loved and respected them.” - Harvey Pekar

34. “Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.” - Jodi Picoult

35. “It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents-- the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.” - Claudia Gray

36. “Tell me why.” My voice shook. “Tell me right now.” - Claudia Gray

37. “I’m going, and don’t you dare try to stop me.”I ran through the door, willing myself to make it downstairs before I started to cry.” - Claudia Gray

38. “Parenthood...It's about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.” - Peter Krause (Parenthood)

39. “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.” - Charles R. Sledge Jr.

40. “But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.” - Mitch Albom

41. “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.” - Heather Brewer

42. “The sudden silence is horrifying, and it seems to catch my mother off guard. A tiny whimper escapes her, the sound amplified in the stillness. Surely, my father hears her now; surely he and I can't go on pretending she isn't crying.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

43. “A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

44. “If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.” - Christopher Hitchens

45. “Nightmares did come true. Because, after her second night of major loving with the man of her dreams, the absolute last person she ever wanted to see was her mother. Yet there she was, her small, hefty frame trundling up the stairs to Maira’s front door.She was so frozen with horror, she couldn’t move until she heard the doorbell ring.Don’t answer it. Maybe she’ll go away.Well, that was just stupid.” - Alisha Rai

46. “His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.” - Margaret Atwood

47. “Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?” - Rick Riordan

48. “You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.” - Ashly Lorenzana

49. “Milton's learned vocabulary [...] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.” - John Broadbent

50. “When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.” - Bret Easton Ellis

51. “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.” - J. Courtney Sullivan

52. “They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her.” - W. Somerset Maugham

53. “She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.” - Brad Meltzer

54. “A dog's good for filling a grief-dug hole.""In the Shape of Shep” - Eileen Granfors

55. “Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.” - Stephen M. Irwin

56. “Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of having a gimp leg. When he saw, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps towards us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank down on her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood.It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. "You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel," she said. "And thank me, too."Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it. I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arms around my shoulders."There weren't no guardian angel, Dad," I said. I started explaining how I'd gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Well, darling," he said, "maybe the angel was you.” - Jeannette Walls

57. “A criança ao nascer já traz um determinado potencial; são os pais, no entanto, que podem torná-la capaz de realizar esse potencial” - Carlos Messa

58. “Nós, pais erramos muito e frequentemente porque os manuais são genéricos e nosso produto específico.” - Carlos Messa

59. “Pais que não conhecem a si mesmo não são capazes de evitar a reprodução, em seus filhos, de suas disfunções” - Carlos Messa

60. “It never gets easier, missing you. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.” - Heather Brewer

61. “The reasonableness of the command to obey parents is clear to children, even when quite young.” - Noah Webster

62. “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” - Maya Angelou

63. “Parents should also question much of the contemporary emphasis on special materials and equipment for learning in a child's environment. A clutter of toys can be more confusing than satisfying to a child. On the other hand, natural situations, with opportunieties to explore, seldom overstimulate or trouble a small child. Furthermore, most children will find greater satisfaction and demonsstrate greater learning from things they make and do with their parents or other people than from elaborate toys or learning materials. And there is no substitute for solitude - in the sandpile, mud puddle, or play area - for a yound child to work out his own fantasies. Yet this privilege is often denied in our anxiety to institutionalize children.” - Raymond S. Moore

64. “...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)” - Robert Whitaker

65. “Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.” - Anne Lamott

66. “Mom actually said that?" Cassie's face shown with happiness. "She always hated my math!""Nah," Martin said. "She was just being that way for you. She thought it was what you needed to hear. If parents told us what they really think about stuff, we could figure them out like regular people.” - Clare B. Dunkle

67. “Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different” - Tana French

68. “Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.” - Jonathan Franzen

69. “Parents shouldn't leave their kids unless —unless they've got to.” - J.K. Rowling

70. “Spies and parents never sleep.” - Linda Gerber

71. “For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.” - William S. Burroughs

72. “It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents' lives before I was born.” - Robert Drewe

73. “Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.” - Sinclair Lewis

74. “The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.” - Kristen Crockett

75. “By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore

76. “The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.” - George Bernard Shaw

77. “Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

78. “I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

79. “The problem was that I'd never worn a bikini before. My dad doesn't allow them. He thinks even one-pieces show too much skin and constantly suggests that Jane and I wear wet suits.” - Janette Rallison

80. “Parents have to instill the right principles in their children, but then it's up to the children to live up to those principles.” - Mary Lydon Simonsen

81. “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.” - Katie Kacvinsky

82. “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.” - Jim Morrison

83. “She has to live, Eliott. I owe her a lifetime of apologies.”“Sometimes I think that’s all we owe our parents.” - Bethany Griffin

84. “How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?” - Gabrielle Hamilton

85. “I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.” - Johann Hari

86. “It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.” - Jeannette Walls

87. “That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.” - J.X. Burros

88. “Tatlo ang magulang ng henerasyon natin. Ang tatay, ang nanay, at ang mga patalastas o media. Kaya kung mahina yung dalawang nauna, naagawan sila ng ikatlo sa pagpapalaki sa bata.” - Bob Ong

89. “Try to find the nicest phrases and words while talking to your parents and be creative because whatever you say, it is not enough” - د.عبدالكريم بكّار

90. “My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.” - Richard Ford

91. “You're perfect. To me you are. You always will be. When you're small you think that about your parents. When you're old, you think that about your kids. You'll see.” - Cristina Alger

92. “After having so nobly disentangled themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority, by a Clandestine Marriage, they were determined never to forfeit the good opinion they had gained in the World, in so doing, by accepting any proposals of reconciliation that might be offered them by their Fathers – to their farther trial of their noble independence however they never were exposed.” - Jane Austen

93. “At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.” - Salman Rushdie

94. “It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.” - Phyllis Diller

95. “It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro

96. “You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,” - Jacqueline Wilson

97. “When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.” - Blake Crouch

98. “I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son.I still do.” - Blake Crouch

99. “My parents were supportive of my creativity but did not have a lot of patience for whimsy with zero production value. They had stuff to do.” - Mindy Kaling

100. “YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.” - Aimee Bender

101. “Das ist eine der anstrengenderen Seiten von Moritz, die er mit dem Alter entwickelt hat - die Mischung aus Perfidie und Sentimentalität.” - Peter Høeg

102. “The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.” - Kate Chopin

103. “So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.” - Virginia Satir

104. “Počas jedného takéhoto kriku, keď tatino naháňal maminu po byte s rybou, ktorá mala ešte oči, som si uvedomila, že neviem, čo budem robiť, keď tu nebudú. Nejde o to, že si neviem navariť nič iné ako párky alebo že budem chodiť v pokrčených veciach, lebo neznášam žehlenie, alebo že nebudem mať z čoho platiť nájom, pretože si neviem predstaviť, že ma niekto zamestná. Prinajhoršom budem hladná, nezamestnaná a pokrčená, ale ako môže človek existovať bez svojich rodičov?” - Vladimíra Galková

105. “exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.” - David Levithan

106. “My parents are great listenersWhich is why I never tell them anything” - Sonya Sones

107. “When I think of Tomodachi, I think of your mother. Your mother, she too lose her baby. She lose you. That very sad thing for her. Maybe she come looking, and she not find you. You not there when she come. She think you dead for ever. But she see you in her mind. Now as I speak maybe she see you in her mind. You always there. I know. I have son too. I have Michiya. He always in my head. Like Kimi. They dead for sure, but they in my head. They in my head forever.” - Michael Morpurgo

108. “Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he'd gone long, long ago. I'd just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way, he was another victim of the shooting, One of the ones who couldn't get away. "Are you mad?" he asked, which I thought was a really strange question. "Yes," I said. And I was. It's just that I wasn't so sure I was mad at him. But I don't think he needed to hear that part. I don't think he wanted to hear that part. I think it was important to him to hear that I cared enough to be angry."Will you ever forgive me?" he asked."Will you ever forgive me?" I shot back, leveling my gaze directly into his eyes.He stared into them for a few moments then got up silently and headed for the door. He didn't turn around when he reached it. Just grabbed the doorknob and held it. "No," he said without facing me. "Maybe that makes me a bad parent, but I don't know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You might not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy."He opened the door."I'm sorry. I really am." He stepped out into the hallway. "I'll leave my new address and phone number with your mother," he said before walking slowly out of my sight.” - Jennifer Brown

109. “We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reached out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.” - Jennifer Brown

110. “And I know I need to invite him over for dinner, because there's no question. This is serious.” - Tamara Ireland Stone

111. “I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

112. “It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

113. “A warm feeling fell over the boy. A mix of security and comfort, as if a blanket were wrapping its soft layers around his heart and nuzzling him snuggly. Gavin loved his mother, and he would be forever grateful to his father for protecting her. The whole mystery behind it made him itch with curiosity, however.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

114. “To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.” - Marita Golden

115. “I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?” - Melina Marchetta

116. “As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.” - Louise Gluck

117. “Take sex, for instance.''What do you want me to do with it?''Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.'[...]Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [...] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.” - John Mortimer

118. “The problem with parents is that they're adults.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

119. “First, I'm not getting married, so you can forget the wife. Second, if I was insane enough to get married, I wouldn't have kids. Third, if I was insane enough to get married and have kids, it would be a cold day in hell I'd let you babysit.” - Jennifer Crusie

120. “Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.” - Jonathan Franzen

121. “The ToysMy little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise, Having my law the seventh time disobey'd, I struck him, and dismiss'd With hard words and unkiss'd,—His Mother, who was patient, being dead. Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep, I visited his bed, But found him slumbering deep, With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet From his late sobbing wet. And I, with moan, Kissing away his tears, left others of my own; For, on a table drawn beside his head, He had put, within his reach, A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone, A piece of glass abraded by the beach, And six or seven shells, A bottle with bluebells, And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, To comfort his sad heart. So when that night I pray'd To God, I wept, and said: Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath, Not vexing Thee in death, And Thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 'I will be sorry for their childishness.” - Coventry Patmore

122. “Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The most unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.” - Thisuri Wanniarachchi

123. “There's nothing like your mother's sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.” - Sophie Kinsella

124. “Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.” - Salman Rushdie