Emotional Inheritance Quotes

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

A sister is someone who owns part of what you own: a house, perhaps, or a less tangible legacy, like memories of your childhood and the experience of your family.

The greatest legacy we can leave our children is happy memories.

The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?

I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

Pain is handed down from one generation to the next.

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers

My mother's mild-eyed sadness looks at me from the eyes of those I love.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Relationships are so much a rerun of our parental relationships. We're rerunning the relationship they were in together and we're rerunning the relationship we had with them with our lover.

I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.

Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should.

The very best reason parents are so special . . . is because we are the holders of a priceless gift, a gift we received from countless generations we never knew, a gift that only we now possess and only we can give to our children. That unique gift, of course, is the gift of ourselves. Whatever we can do to give that gift, and to help others receive it, is worth the challenge of all our human endeavor.

I have my mother's heart and father's face.

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

The woman who bore me is no longer alive, but I seem to be her daughter in increasingly profound ways.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

My mom is very calm and quiet, so I think I got that from her. Because my dad is passionate and loud... It was always interesting, and I really enjoyed that my parents always included us in their lives.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.