Mitch Albom Quotes

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

Parents, you know, can be terrible.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

An abused childhood affects the entire life... It affects every facet of the life.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

Your father leaving your family, that's your bedrock for all your future relationships and that's your security when you're a kid.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

What God is to the world, that parents are to their children.

Since I've had children I don't really like horror movies.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.

I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.

Sometimes [people] say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. In my case, I am pretty fortunate. [ My kids]'re pretty balanced, cool kids, going through pretty much the same thing all the other kids go through. There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do. I don't think they know a lot about what I do, other than that I am in this crazy band, Mötley Crüe.

I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.

Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn't.

What assurance do I have that your parenting isn't screwing me up?