East of Eden Family Quotes

This is called disillusionment, and it's a pretty unavoidable part of maturing. But look at the way the narrator talks about children's views of their parents—he calls their intelligence divine and refers to them as gods. In other words, kids sometimes tend to see their parents as perfect god-like beings until they realize that parents are actually just people who inevitably screw up. When Adam realizes this about Cyrus, he is able to stop caring about what Cyrus thinks, but Charles doesn't get there until much, much later.

It looks like the Hamiltons get an A+ in Family Matters. No scandals, no tragedies, no aiming too high or too low. Heck, they don't even move around that often. The Trasks, on the other hand, have all of these things: sex scandals, death, violence, falls from grace, sketchy fortunes got by probably-illegal means… So we've got a contrast between a family that is large and settled, and one that is hastily pulled together and not exactly loving.

This is Adam's answer to Charles's question about whether he loved their father. It isn't exactly surprising because Adam realizes at a young age that his father is not the great man he pretends to be. Charles, though, has spent his whole life fighting for his father's love, so he can't even conceive of the idea that it might not even be worth it. Ironically, Adam was the one who had to carry the burden of being the favorite son—a role he really didn't want. Why does love work that way?

This refers to the guilt and punishment Cain takes with him when he high-tails it out of Eden. Adam is really down with this idea of nothing being our fault. Blame everything on our parents, right? Okay, so while we do get a lot from our parents, both good and bad, we can only take the excuses so far. We'll see this idea of using ancestry as an excuse come up later again in the novel when Cal finds out about Kate.

What does it mean to have your parents in you? Does it mean that if your father started balding at age twenty then you will too? Does it mean that we inherit their personalities? Cal is afraid that he might just be a little too similar to Kate for there to be any hope of not being like her. What's more, he understands Kate, and Kate is inscrutable to most people (except to Charles, whom Cal suspiciously resembles in more ways than one)—that's a pretty strong sign that he has gotten more from Kate than just her eyes or hair color.

Whoa—is Kate actually showing some maternal instincts? We never thought we'd see the day, but apparently Aron's luscious golden locks can make anybody fall in love with him. Actually, it might just literally be Aron's looks that win Kate over: she seems to really dig that he looks like her, to the point that maybe they could be mistaken for siblings (yeah right, Kate). But isn't it strange that Kate should want her son to be her brother? And isn't it weird that Aron is like the exact opposite of Kate personality-wise? It's almost like Aron is Kate minus all of the evil—and maybe that's why Kate finds herself strangely drawn to him.

This is the conversation where Aron is telling Cal that college sucks. The notion that the entire universe doesn't hinge on Adam's wishes blows Cal's mind—his entire existence revolves around trying to make Adam happy. Aron, though, couldn't care less. To him Adam is the idiot father who lost all of his money in a stupid lettuce scheme. How can two brothers hold such different views of the same person? What is the determining factor here? What was it for Charles and Adam with their father?

Nobody's perfect and everyone has got some skeletons hiding in their closets, and while Cal likes to freak out about this, Abra takes it all with a grain of salt. Familial baggage, to her, is only as big of a deal as you let it be.

This is Lee talking, so we know that whatever he's talking about is abstract. Here he's talking about generations inheriting the impurities or mistakes of the generations before them—like family, but on a human race scale. The key word here is thought, though—these aren't things Lee thinks anymore.

You might remember that earlier in the novel when Adam, Lee, and Samuel are first discussing the story of Cain and Abel, Samuel remarks that Abel had no children. That means that, according to the Bible, all of humanity is descended from Cain, the world's first bona-fide murderer. Pretty sinister, right? But in this quote, Lee is pointing out that things don't have to be that way. Adam could create another generation of guilt-ridden fratricidal Trasks by denying Cal his love, but how does that benefit Adam? Wouldn't it be better if he broke the vicious cycle?