Mark Vonnegut Quotes

I've spent the first part of my life in the shadow of my family. I'm not going to live in the shadow of my husband.

I never put a lot of praise on myself because of my relationship with Ike. I was just happy when I started to like myself - when I divorced and took control of my life.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

Yes, I'm very close to my family. And being that close to your family, I think you also struggle with how to become your own person.

When you grow up without a brother or sister, you tend to see things just through your own eyes. You have friends and everything, but you spend most of your time watching TV or sat in a room making decisions about your life on your own.

You never know how your kids are going to turn out. You can raise them with all the best intentions, and then they're own people, and they have their own inner conflicts. You just hope you've given them some good stuff to navigate with.

I mean my mother always wanted us to be individuals. She always instilled that into our brains which was incredibly painful for an adolescent to deal with.

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

It's not easy to find your own way when you believe that you need love, approval, appreciation, or anything from your family. It's particularly hard when you want them to see things your way.

Everything makes you who you are, so I was lucky that I had a good family that was horrified by what I wanted to do but was also supportive of it, right to the very end.

My mother always taught me, even my dad, just never let other people's opinions of you shape your opinion of yourself. And I never have and I never will.

Sometimes I just walk through; I just show up, as in The Other Sister.

It doesn't matter what people think of me. I've lived my life.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Feel what you feel, know what you know, and set your relatives free to do the same.

I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.

It's important to me to try and expose young people to the things they believe are off-limits to them. I tell them, 'There are no walls, only the ones we put up.' My advice to young people looking at my life is not to follow my footprint but to go out there and make their own.

It is a parent's responsibility to preserve the connection with their children, to preserve the relationship, so that the children can let go and become their own selves.

People reach an age... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

A sense of freedom is something that, happily, comes with age and life experience.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.