How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
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 judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. (3.2.1)
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.
Quote #2
All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas Valley, no poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. Samuel was well pleased with the fruit of his loins. (5.1.33)
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.
Quote #3
"All right, I'll tell you. No. I didn't. Sometimes he scared me. Sometimes—yes, sometimes I admired him, but most of the time I hated him." (7.3.50)
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?