How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive. (4.234)
Time and time again, the novel shows us how our reality rarely meets expectations. There's no magic spell that will change your personality—you are who you are.
Quote #8
Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parents pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mothers' illusions. (4.248)
Isn't this exactly how Gary treats Enid as an adult? He desperately wants his mother's approval, even if it requires misrepresenting his own feelings.
Quote #9
The scene was so wrong, so sick with Revenge, that for a moment Alfred honestly thought the boy at the table was a ghost from his own childhood. (4.378)
It looks like the cycle goes farther back than we thought. You can imagine it going back even farther, with each successive generation trying in vain to do things differently, but failing.