Edna O'Brien Quotes

The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man - the sense of wonder.

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

A parent who has never apologized to his children is a monster. If he's always apologizing, his children are monsters.

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

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

I think having children in general is always very helpful for acting.

I have two kids, and anyone who has a kid in order to feel loved is going to be in trouble because kids are first and foremost all about themselves. They'll say they love you, but 10 seconds later they'll turn on you.

The best thing I can recommend is to listen to your child. I really mean that.

I am a family man, and I have children.

Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.

That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty LOVE TANK.

Parents are never forgiven for not giving just the right response at the appropriate moment. Or, rather, there are particular times in the adolescent's or young adult's life, when a certain response is needed, and this need is not met, and the failure to meet this need is forever remembered, and is never forgiven.

When you have a child yourself, you go back and think about how you were parented, how you were mothered and what your parents did for you, and you just want to be able to call and ask them.

Realizing that my children are the center of the universe and not me is probably one of the greatest ways to acclimatize.

We are the buffoons of our children.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

Most parents don’t know really their children.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you.

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