Parenthood Quotes - Page 3

Recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had “thought that mothers never had to sleep.

Robert A. Caro

I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. (His 19-year-old daughter.) I cannot possibly do both.

Theodore Roosevelt

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.

Donald Miller

She had dealt with her pregnancy by wrapping herself in dreams.

Robert K. Massie

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

It’s a beautiful thing to see a man put so much trust in his children; to put so much care into their emotional well-being, to build them up from the earliest stages, and motivate them. Most parents are stumped when it comes to their first-born, they are not sure what are the right and wrong things to do, but Mr. Ellison was a natural… He gave his first born everything he never had, and multiplied it with an excessive amount of love and still kept a company going—- face immeasurable amount of pressure and stress, as he said:“ It was the most traumatic period in my life.

Avra Amar Filion

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

Sarah Ruhl

There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules. …There is pride, too, though–pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

Anthony Doerr

A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid's first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe.

Ron Suskind

You raise them half-decent, and they grow up and leave. They move to Miami or California-- someplace with gourmet groceries and nude beaches because you've reared them to cook good and be liberal minded. It's just the opposite with your failures-- them kids stick to your tail like a cocklebur. You'd think it would be the other way around, but it's not. No matter how old I get, this will always amaze me.

Michael Lee West

Her mother admonished through closed lips, the sound a mother can make mean anything from "pick up your socks" to "we are very disappointed you have murdered those orphans.

Thomm Quackenbush

Emma, Emma, Emma," I said, wishing I could somehow teach her to take the smaller blows of life in her stride.

Jane Hamilton

That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute ago, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't.

Dorothy Johnston

But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years.

Jennifer Senior

These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

Mona Simpson

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.

H.W. Brands

There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.

H.W. Brands

It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized that I would do anything - anything - to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of worth of your own life is changed so much."Tatsu.

Barry Eisler

A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.

John Howard Griffin

Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought now beyond the span of years, and into a future that glistened ahead into centuries. It's one thing, I suppose, to have a prophet tell you that you will found a dynasty. Now, it seemed, he allowed himself to truly believe it.

Geraldine Brooks

The author stipulates that while television lately background noise for a child, it tends to shift to the foreground for the adult. The adult pays enough attention to the media attention is paid to the child.

Gary Chapman

Adams looks forward to teaching his granddaughters about planting trees, noting that they already show inclination toward this and need only be encouraged in the naturalist pursuits he has found so healthy.

Paul C. Nagel

I was too old for my father to (be protective), too young to be flattered.

Catherine Marshall

We've been here dozen of times since we met, but this precious month before the baby is born feels like a last first date. There's a different kind of romance beginning. We will never again be entirely alone in the world

Elizabeth Bard

On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him; the man's expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries; the woman’s expression was blasé, distant, smug, sometimes even (inexplicably) spiteful. This pattern Chantal saw repeated in several variants: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller and also carrying another baby on his hack, in a specially made sack: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller, carrying one baby on his shoulders and another in a belly carrier: the man alongside a woman had no stroller but was holding one child by the hand and carrying three others, on his back, his belly, and his shoulders. Then, finally, with no man. a woman was pushing the stroller: she was doing it with a force unseen in the men, such that Chantal, walking on the same sidewalk, had to leap out of her way at the last moment.Chantal thinks: men have daddified themselves. They aren't fathers, they're just daddies, which means: fathers without a father's authority.

Milan Kundera

He did not so much follow his father's example as his father's vision.

John Taliaferro

I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.

Kenneth MacKenzie

All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another

Kenneth MacKenzie

But he was sixty-two when I was, born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before.

Jane Smiley

The goal of a true family is not that their children follow in their footsteps, but that their children surpass them in all ways.

Andrew Vachss

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.

Pearl S. Buck

Children who are well nurtured and whose parents help them learn how to calm down when they are upset, for instance, seem to develop greater strength in the brain’s circuits for managing distress;

Lisa Lantieri

They are full of wonder and awe and can play creatively. Sometimes they can sense things that adults often take time to perceive or know. For example, young children are able to make quick intuitive decisions about whom they will be friendly with. However, when this aspect of a child is not affirmed and noticed, it becomes hidden and repressed. As a result, young children can lose touch with a part of themselves that is already quite well developed.

Lisa Lantieri

You´re my son, Ed. You might be idiotic and irresponsible, but it doesn´t make the slightest difference to what I feel for you. I´m pissed off that you could have thought it would

Jojo Moyes

A man with no children can easily be lulled into a sense that time is standing still. It's not. It's marching past us, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this unavoidably clear.

Jonathan V Last

Scratch a female inmate, I've discovered, and you'll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men.

Cammie McGovern

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?

Robin Epstein

I said that additionally, since I was planning to nurse, it be best if you were off the breast before I came back to work. My boss just looked at me dreamily and said, 'That won't be for sixty years, at least.

Suzanne Finnamore

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.

Bill Bryson

She has seen him fight his own brutal nature, and the Earth itself, in order to be the parent she needs. He has helped her learn to love herself for what she is.

N K Jemisin

Biology doesn't make anyone a parent," Cassia added as she tucked her Eturian prayer stone beneath her shirt.

Melissa Landers

Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.

Kiese Laymon

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?

Ted Chiang

A man can make a son but a true man would be a father. A lady can have a child, but a real mother raises the child.

Sofia Reyes

Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.

Emma Donoghue

Esme skips on ahead. Jumping from one foot to the other, as if she can see markings on the ground he can’t. She is constantly jumping and skipping and twirling with the lightness of falling snow, looking up at him bright with questions, tugging on his hand, dashing off with all the speed her body is capable of and then skipping on the spot up ahead as if consecrating it for his arrival. It is so easy to make her happy that it seems like cheating at times.

Glenn Haybittle

It's a wild ride, this parenthood thing. Hardest thing I've done in my life and by far the best.

Aidan Donnelley Rowley

You right! You one hundred percent right! I done spent the last seventeen years worrying about what you got. Now it’s your turn, see? I’ll tell you what to do. You grown . . . we don established that. You a man. Now, let’s see you act like one. Turn your behind around and walk out this yard. And when you get out there in the alley . . . you can forget about this house. See? Cause this is my house. You go on and be a man and get your own house. You can forget about this. You can forget about this. ‘Cause this is mine. You go on and get yours because I’m through with doing for you.

August Wilson

It would have been helpful if there was a Mayo Clinic chapter about the topic of "leaving." Man, I would have read that chapter over and over -- leaving your wailing baby in the morning without wanting to slit your wrists; leaving your desk even though you are only a half hour away from completing something that would feel so good to wrap up; leaving the building so no one notices that you are actually leaving. I was much more interested in honing that skill than learning how to puree apples and carrots to freeze in ice-cube trays (not that I ever did that either). As long as I was a full-time working mother with a clock to punch or a train to catch -- as I would be for eight more years -- I never figured out how to leave with grace or with so-called conviction.

Jenny Rosenstrach

Parenthood is a very sacred journey but only a few owe it!

Tehreem Rahat

If a brokenhearted mother could sing, I could not remain silent.

Beth Moore

The thing is, after having your first baby - there is no 'normal'. The reason form this is that there is actually no time for normality. Feeding, changing, washing muslins and generally cooing over your baby takes 25 hours a day and there is little room for anything else. Plus, you also need time to nap if you are going to recover well from your pregnancy and birth. So if you are pressurising yourself on top of that to make plans or worry about underarm depilation, you are pushing yourself far too much. Keep everything calm so you stay calm. Listen to your body. Trust yourself to know how much is 'too much'.

Dr Ellie Cannon

Parents need to see that every situation that their kids find themselves in is a teaching situation, and they need to take the time to explore cost and effect. So talking to your children, explaining things to children as to why things happen in the world. Getting them to see cost and relationships between events is the best way to increase comprehension skills. Daynette Gardiner, the best School Psychologist in The Bahamas.

Drexel Deal

I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.

Preeti Shenoy

Make me the father, O Lord, who will show my sons enough of a sense of humor, so that they will always be serious, but never take themselves too seriously. Give them humility, so they will always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

Thom S. Rainer

You are the closest I will ever come to magic.

Suzanne Finnamore

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.

Nicole Krauss

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?

Gustave Flaubert

When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.

Suzanne Finnamore

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.

Kelly Corrigan

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Parenthood Quotes - Page 3

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