Richard Smalley Quotes

To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.

Do not try to live your children's lives out of your own frustrations.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

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.

Parents forgive their children least readily for the faults they themselves instilled in them.

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it.

Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl.

Parents are perhaps the most common object of resentment, the people who are most frequently blamed for all our failings and failures alike.

When you grew up like me and my four brothers, you end up feeling somewhat inadequate, like somehow you don't count. I was very ill as a child and in and out of hospital. That sort of alienates you, and in my songs I put that to good use.

My dad died when I was 15 and worked way too much.

Moms and dads don't last forever. If you've got unfinished business, we need to face that, and that's not easy. Every child wants to love their mother and their father. Love is the most important thing, and when they feel rejected and unloved, that hole can never be filled by anyone else.

I think the Knight boys have a long history of disappointing their fathers.

Dad couldn't train me. He was too high-strung, like, 'Throw your jab!' and I'd start crying.

I met Roy's father once... And I think that Roy's relationship with his father is still at the heart of what Roy does. But at the end of the day, he's trying to prove himself to a father he'll never really please.

I'd always been insecure. Being the fourth of five kids means attention is divided five ways, and to do this equally is impossible. I grew up feeling like the little orphan in the family, the one who didn't fit in.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

I know plenty of Hollywood kids who still struggle with being whole. Their lives are never fully their own - always in the grip of a parent who put celebrity ahead of them.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

I do not want any child in America to have my childhood because it was taken away from me because I just wasn't good enough; well I am good enough now.

I sort of locked into the idea that if I could be the perfect son to both of my parents, well maybe that would be enough to keep them together. And ultimately, obviously, it wasn't. Regardless of what I tried to do. That was a lesson about limitations.

Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.

The story of Warner Brothers' movie, 'Mildred Pierce,' recounts the enormous and unrewarded sacrifices that a mother (Joan Crawford) makes for her spoiled, greedy daughter (Ann Blythe).

I wanted to be loved by my father. I could do anything to be loved by my father.