Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Children, a lot of times, can't make their parents wrong because they have to live with them, because they have to love them. And when you're young, you can't get on your Big Wheel and go down to the Best Western. You've got to live there and you've got to figure it out.

I don't know any woman who has a simple relationship with their mother or with their daughter.

Sometimes my mother had difficulty communicating with me about certain topics.

I don't like my parents; I never will. I didn't cry at either of their funerals. I haven't missed them for five seconds. I didn't - you know, our characters were so at odds with one another right from the beginning. But I do understand them now as human beings, with the understanding of an adult.

It's great if the in-laws themselves put up boundaries. But if they won't; it's up to their grown kids to do it and enforce them.

Parents don't understand kids and kids don't understand parents. My parents were divorced when I was really young and I went to live with my dad.

I'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.

I just wish I could understand my father.

I love my mom. My mom loves me. We don't have an easy relationship. I don't think we ever will, but I'd rather have a complicated, misunderstood relationship than have no relationship at all.

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

Scrawling 'I'm gay' in lipstick on your parents' bedroom mirror may demonstrate a personal signature of the highest style, but is not particularly sensitive to their feelings. Upon hearing me utter those words almost twenty years ago, my own mother did what and self-respecting middle-class mom would do: went directly into a seizure.

It's not like he called me up and asked me. They've never wanted to throw us into that world, and I think our decision probably shocked them. But I love my dad, and I think I'd regret it if I didn't do this.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have somebody in my family who's in the business.

As much as I love and respect my brother, I'm doing my best to distance myself from him and kind of show people that, even though we do look similar and have similar mannerisms, we are completely different.

I'm blessed with three children who actually aren't terribly impressed with pandering to my ego, and one of my children has a bit of a problem with the sex scenes because when she reads the stuff, she hears my voice in her head, and apparently reading a sex scene written by your mother with her describing it is rather off-putting!

We're used to boy meets girl, boy likes girl, instant attraction on TV. But you throw a son in there, you throw a marriage in there, and you've got some really good character stuff.

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.

I didn't actually get along with my dad when I was growing up, so by the time I was in my 20s, I didn't think I was going to be a writer.

I think the deepest problem is between my parents and me. I just don't know if it will ever be the same.

There will be no 'Mommie Dearest' in the lives of my children, and no books like the one the Crosby boy wrote about Bing, or Bette Davis's daughter has written. My children love me very much, and they are loved.

I resemble the father I once hated.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there.