Generational Patterns Quotes

I wanted above all else not to be like my mum.

I was a mother's boy.

At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That's what I'm doing for my boys now.

I am like my mom: early to bed and early to rise.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

The fundamental human truth underpinning 'Ox Mountain Death Song' is that men so very often turn into their fathers. The way that everything gets passed down.

'Like Father, Like Son' gave me the opportunity to show when it is not good with a father.

In one way or another, everybody has this experience in their lives... the moment when you have to define your relationship to family and how your family's made you who you are, whether you've spent your life running from your family or deeply connected to your family.

During the holidays, I often see my sisters, who still, even after all these years, can't always seem to agree with me. They take silly, indefensible positions, such as denying that my parents loved me more because I was the better child.

You always want to break away from your parents, and you always think, 'I'm never going to be like that guy.' What I've discovered is you kind of wind up becoming your parents, which is also a cliche in itself. My father, despite the fact that he's been dead for over 25 years, he's been a huge influence on me.

The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

My greatest fear for my child is that he marries a woman exactly like me.

Family is conflict and it's something that we all relate to.

I'd always fought against presenting radio really, because my father was a radio DJ in Australia. He's just recently retired. And I kind of didn't want to follow in his footsteps. But I suppose, as we all find as we become older, to some extent we do all become our parents.

Your parents put a curse on you - Someday your kids are going to act just like you.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother, so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn't as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

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

I think naturally my orientation is from my father.

I think some of my darkness comes from my dad. There is definitely convict history on that side of the family, a lot of dodginess. But with the darkness can also come entrepreneurialism, genius traits.

I have three older brothers, and each one of them has chosen one of my parents' education. Two of them are actors, and the third is a doctor as my mother is.

As everyone, you do end up becoming your mother, but also as you're acting, I find out you become every member of your family, bits come out without you really wanting them to come out.

Most of the career choices I've made have been because of my family.