Natalie Wood Quotes

My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.

I've been the type of father who tries desperately to be perfect but doesn't succeed all the time.

In my family, if I talk back to my dad, I get in trouble.

Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.

But I was very, very unhappy because my mother was very charming and generous, but to me, very dominating.

Our standards for motherhood are so high that many of us harbor intense, secret guilt for every harsh word we speak to our children, every negative thought that enters our minds.

My mom, she's the strict one. If we did something bad, we'd get a whippin' but nothing too bad.

As a parent you walk around trying to be perfect, but you don't have to be perfect. That's the key. You just have to be faithful, and when I say faithful I mean you have to give your all.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

Power is of two kinds: one is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love.

I'd really like to go with you, Agachak. Truly I would...but I just can't." "I don't understand. Why not?" "I'm not allowed to leave home. My mother'd punish me something awful if I did..." "But you're the king." "That doesn't change a thing. I still do what mother says. She tells everybody that I'm the best boy ever when it comes to that." Agachak resisted a powerful urge to change this half-wit into a toad or perhaps a jellyfish.

It's easy to manipulate your children when they're absolutely sure you're stupid.

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.

When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.

For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn't swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair - I can still see the big umbrella - she called to my father, "Throw them in! Throw them in! They'll swim!" So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life!

Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

That was a judicious mother who said, "I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me.

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. A very simple, but very cunning trick to manipulate you. They have condemned you, because if you are accepted, not condemned - loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay - then it will be difficult to control you. How to control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn't arise.

When I was a kid I got no respect. When I went on the roller coaster, my old man told me to stand up straight.

My mother could make anybody feel guilty - she used to get letters of apology from people she didn't even know.

They heard the click of the mail slot and flop of letters on the doormat. "Get the mail, Dudley," said Uncle Vernon from behind his paper. "Make Harry get it." "Get the mail, Harry." "Make Dudley get it." "Poke him with your Smelting stick, Dudley.

You’re not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.