Ogden Nash Quotes

There's a lot of ways someone can grow up, but one way is discovering your parents are not all they say they are.

I've always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I've heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

I speak with my father about everything in my life.

It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.

My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.

Think about finding out when you're 13 that your dad is not your dad. It's like, okay, take it on the chin and keep going. No choice, really.

It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

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

I don't think my parents know what I do.

We busted a lot of family secrets with this. But to make a long story short, my parents relationship was built heavily on security issues for my Mom, and when my Dad couldn't provide security, the relationship unraveled.

I found out when I was 18 that Dad had left my mother and the family before he realised he was ill and then died. When I asked Mum about it, she just sort of shrugged it off and said she'd thought I knew about it all along. Of course I hadn't, though I'm sure she must have been desperately unhappy at the time.

I remember asking my mum when I was about 13, 'Why are my brothers and sister so much older than me?' And she just said, 'You were a mistake.' And I laughed.

Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents' secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household.

I don't think it's healthy to have secrets; they hang over a family for generations.

Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them.

Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.

You can't always trust your mother.

She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line "You have to swear you'll never repeat this." I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing.

And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.

I firmly believe kids don't want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you're in big trouble.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.

You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you.

How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives

Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore.