You didn't have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.
Marian Wright Edelman

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
Henry Rollins

My parents were working in a hospital in Memphis. But I didn't live there for any length of time that I remember. The first thing I remember is the town in Mississippi that I live in now, Charleston.
Morgan Freeman

I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt.
Natalie Wood

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing

Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.
John McEnroe

Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right.
Steve Wozniak

The beauty of "spacing" children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
Sydney J. Harris

Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
Fred Rogers

My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.
Augusten Burroughs

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.
Steven Morrissey

I love my parents. Coming out to them was sort of coming out to myself. I educated them, and I wanted our relationship to keep growing. I wanted them to be a part of my life still. I wanted to be able to share with them what I was going through.
Randy Harrison

I wasn't being bullied at school at this point. I had a group of friends, and I was isolated because I wasn't communicating with my parents. I wasn't telling them what I was going through.
Randy Harrison

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.
Barbara Bush

I always wanted to make sure my parents didn't have to work again for the rest of their lives.
Deion Sanders

I wasn't the high-school play queen or anything. And my parents would let me act until I graduated from college.
Gwyneth Paltrow

I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected enough as a child.
Don Van Vliet

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor.
Sam Levenson

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
Nicolas de Chamfort