On parents

When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolution. The Gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of Gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

East of Eden