Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I learn more from my kids then I have any professor in all my life.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

But what parent can tell when some . . . fragmentary gift of knowledge or wisdom will enrich her children's lives? Or how a small seed of information passed from one generation to another may generate a new science, a new industry-a seed which neither the giver nor the receiver can truly evaluate at the time.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Most parents don’t know really their children.

I’ve noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.

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

Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

My theory is that there is a finite amount of intelligence in a family, and you're supposed to gradually transfer it to your children over a period of many years. This is why your parents started to get so stupid just at the time in your life when you were getting really smart.

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.

It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.

If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.

there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.

If parents would only realize how they bore their children.

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children

Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare.

I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.