Eventually, many years later, I came to see him the way everyone else saw him–a nice guy who, despite all the damage he did to us, wasn’t a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn’t very bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and lost, people not only liked him, they protected him. My mother, despite her poverty, left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her. And that was another difference between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions of food stamps. John William Tuohy
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar...
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Sharon Olds
Each one of us has hated his or her parents at some point in early life … how quickly we turn around our feelings determines our extent of success.
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Sandeep Sahajpal
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...
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Jeffrey Eugenides
I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.
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Ottessa Moshfegh
No matter how long it’s been or how far you’ve drifted, no matter how unknowable you might be, there were at least two people in the world whose job it was to see you, to find you, to recognize you and reel you back in....
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Jennifer E. Smith
More Quotes By John William Tuohy
I felt empty a lot and I sometimes had a sense–and I know this sounds strange–that I really had no existence as my own person, that I could disappear and no one would notice or remember that I had ever existed. It is a terrifying...
Then there are all of those children, the ones who aren’t resilient. The ones who slowly, quietly die. I think the difference is that the kids who bounce back learn to bear a little bit more than they thought they could, and they soon understand...
I don’t know what I would have done if they had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen when I was touched, or flinch,...
Imagine being beaten up every day for something you didn’t do and yet, when it’s over, you keep on smiling. That’s what every day of Donald’s life was like. His death was a small death. No one mourned his passing; they merely agreed it was...
The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. “Ma, ” I asked. “Where did you get the...
