All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence.

Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

All parents damage their children. IT cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
The damage done by Eddie's father was, at the beginning, the damage of neglect...
All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beoynd death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.
~pgs 104, 110

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you.

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?

We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply where we simply did not know what to do.

I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.