Jeannette Walls Quotes

I'm working on my relationship with my mother and father, but my upbringing has been very destructive.

I forgive my mom for being a psycho and my dad for being a loser.

I've had this conversation with friends who have had challenging relationships with one or another parent. The only thing I can say is what I feel: The other person isn't going to change. That is who they are.

My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

I built up so much hatred for my parents, like so much anger for the life they had given me.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

I remember my uncle and my father telling me that my mother didn't want me because I was blind. She thought being blind was a disgrace and a punishment from God. I understand that a lot of young mothers probably wouldn't know what to do in that situation, but over your life you learn to forgive everything.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.

I know whatever my father did, in his own way, he still loved me.

I had to get in touch with the source, I had to go back into my abandonment issues with my mother, I had to go into issues with my father I hadn't even looked at before.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

Unfortunately, some parents simply don't love their children. Probably they don't even love themselves. That may be the heart of their problem. Having parents like this is a terrible burden for any child and can shadow him all through life. It can even destroy him.

You can't force people to love you. If you love somebody, you love them because you love them. People who love you, it doesn't matter; if you're good or bad, they will still love you.

How do you redefine love when your idea of love is something that's so violent? When your idea of passion is anger, how do you fix that?

My father left our family for his 'yoga buddy' in 1984, when I was 15. I always stayed in touch with him - I had a deep need to be connected to my father, even though it could be painful at times. I shunned the yoga community because of his actions but eventually realized that yoga could be the antidote to my pain.

People have weaknesses, we should accept it.

Poor parenting may be reflected in poor sibling relationships.

For me, everyone has good and bad qualities. I feel you must not always look at the bad qualities but also focus on the good ones, because we all have flaws.

We are here to love, not to judge. I'd been blaming and raging. I certainly wasn't loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God's love doesn't insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see the need for correction wasn't in my daughter, but in me.