Rithy Panh Quotes

Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

The pain I felt was my father's pain.

I guess I always knew there was something wrong with me, but I thought it was because of my father, or my mother, and the pain they bequeathed to me like a family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation. - Tobias Eaton

I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That's something that gets passed down, too.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

I've felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father's family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

Relationships are so much a rerun of our parental relationships. We're rerunning the relationship they were in together and we're rerunning the relationship we had with them with our lover.

Even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice.

I don't want my grandchildren to go through what I went through.

It is the perpetual tragedy of all families: each of us believe our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us.

My grandfather was facing this terror, my parents, myself.

The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?

My mother's mild-eyed sadness looks at me from the eyes of those I love.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

I can't do what my mother did, which is tell me every single day of my life about her labor and how long it was and how it was 36 hours of hell .

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.

I hoped that Grace would be a little bit of the best of all of us: Scarlett's spirit, and my mother's strength, Marion's determination, and Michael's sly humor. I wasn't sure what I could give, not just yet. But I would know when I told her about the comet, years from now, I would know. And I would lean close to her ear, saying the words no one else could hear, explaining it all. The language of solace and comets, and the girls we all become, in the end.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.

My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather.