Don't let him upset you," Niko told the four softly. "He's old and he's frightened." "You're as old as him, and you aren't scared of us," Briar pointed out. Niko glared at him. "Thank you so much," he retorted waspishly.
Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.
For my entire life, I have held the cards of my complicated family history very close to my chest.
I have a very wonderfully, bizarrely amazing relationship with my mother in that we've been through a myriad of emotions because we've acted together and played all these different kinds of mother-daughters.
Some people found it difficult to understand my relationship with my father, but that may have been because they couldn't get beyond their relationship with their own parents.
Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.
I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.
In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it.
The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves. ... Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.
When I was a boy I used to do what my father wanted. Now I have to do what my boy wants. My problem is: When am I going to do what I want?
I've been compared to my dad my whole life. That pressure I've learned to deal with.
Daddy was real gentle with kids. That's why I expected so much out of marriage, figuring that all men should be steady and pleasant.
My daughter is in more competition with me. I never wanted to be bigger than my mother or to challenge her.
The young people, they don't knock on the door politely and say "May I come in?" They barge in, they take your seat, and you're obsolete unless you recreate and somehow find grace somewhere else. Another profession may not be like that.
I had my father on the Under-21 team and during the World Cup in France in 1998 - and also in AC Milan for four months. So it was a weird experience, because having your father as a coach is pretty weird, and I was the captain. But he was great.
One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.
This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters, responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be. My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn't be.
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.
Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.
Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)
For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers.
I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.
The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.
