“She was our mother and belonged to us. She was never mentioned to anyone because we simply didn't have enough of her to share.”
Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had never slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.”
Source: Down Among the Sticks and Bones
“Working for Master Mischief? This would be an act of sheer rebellion. Her parents would be livid if they ever found out. And it would be hilarious.”
Source: Not Your Sidekick
“One only has to watch aging siblings scrap over the worthless pots and pans and scuffed furniture of a deceased parent's estate- like toddlers over toys- to see how desperate is the need to wrest some last, pathetic, tangible measure of their parent's devotion.”
Source: Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
“And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I'm overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I'm watching the memory of them.”
Source: Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays
“Living happily with parents requires adjustments.
That takes care of most demons of our minds.”
“They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.”
Source: I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
“With the rum bottle empty, Marsh had moved on to the Guinness in the kitchen cupboard. After a bottle and a half, he’d decided that action was required.the most satisfying sort of action he could think of was ending the little boy’s life.”
Source: Death of an Officer
“They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-eighths that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.”
Source: All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir
“Every child's first lesson in reflection, refraction, surface tension, colloidal solutions, fluid dynamics, and what not, begins with a pool of water on the road.
//All in a child's play”