Family Quotes - Page 36

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

Lauren Willig

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

Rabih Alameddine

Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)

A.E. Coppard

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…

John Burnside

The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me.

Heather O'Neill

When dancing with a pit bull, it's always best to let him lead.

Michael Barnett

Will you be all right?" she askedHow could

Carol Matas

Bett didn't have any siblings because she said her father had preserved what was dead for too long to be able to create life. When Bet was younger and had begged for one, her father gave her a marmot he' stuffed for a man from Wyoming."This is your brother Christopher," he'd said, placing the marmot on Bett's pillow one night. "He doesn't talk much, so you'll have to pick up the slack there.

Rebecca Rasmussen

The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.

Laurie Halse Anderson

If you never learned to hold onto someone, how could it possibly hurt now to let them go?

Shannon L. Alder

Some families are an odd melting pot of strangers with the occasional offering of obligation.

Donna Lynn Hope

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.

Francisco X. Alarcón

And in that moment, Grace understood something that she would never forget: Home wasn't just a building or an apartment with a roof and beds and chairs inside. Home was with her family, wherever they were.

Priscilla Cummings

Following her instructions, I joined her in the chopping and mixing. The magical smell of pickling spices wound around us and it wasn't long before we were in another world. I was suddenly immersed in the hand-written recipes Mother resurrected from the back of the Hoosier cabinet--in the cheesecloth filled with mustard seed and pungent dill. As we followed the recipes her mother had followed and her mother before that, we talked--as the afternoon wore on I was listening to preserve the stories in my mind. 'I can remember watching my grandmother and mother rushing around this same old kitchen, putting up all kinds of vegetables--their own hand-sown, hand-picked crops--for the winter. My grandmother would tell her stories about growing up right here, on this piece of land--some were hilarious and some were tragic.' Pots still steamed on the stove, but Mother's attention seemed directed backwards as she began to speak about the past. She spoke with a slow cadence, a rhythm punctuated (or maybe inspired) by the natural symphony around us.

Leslie Goetsch

Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words ‘to father’ have such a different meaning from the words ‘to mother’.

Claire Fuller

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

Barbara Kingsolver

Strangers take a long time to become acquainted, particularly when they are from the same family.

M.E. Kerr

You want to know what I want? I'm sick of being a guinea pig. I'm sick, but I'm never f*cking sick enough for this family.

Jodi Picoult

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree......unless that tree's growing on top of a hill.

John DePrey

You have no idea how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?"-- Sandre to Catriana

Guy Gavriel Kay

Family drama is a trade off for having family.

C.C. Hunter

A true diamond never over shadows... it's the brilliance of the subtle shine that's the most attractive.

Dena Tyson

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Gregory Maguire

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

George Orwell

We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped.

Charles Dickens

I think that is the very definition of a family: a group of individuals, bound by the essence of love, who share a life together and yet maintain their unique individuality.

Kathy Magliato

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair." Douglas MacArthur

Terri Marie

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful

Douglas Coupland

How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

Jandy Nelson

Sister, why do you do that?""Do what?""Cage the animals at night?""Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.""But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?""Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.

Jennings Michael Burch

Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.

Frederick Douglass

I am convinced that we as adults must constantly cling to, affirm, and celebrate with our children those things we love, sunsets, laughter, the taste of a good meal, the warmth of a hickory fire shared by real friends, the joy of discovery and accomplishment, the constant surprises of life.

Eliot Wigginton

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.

Orhan Pamuk

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

Wendell Berry

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

Nicole Krauss

Our pets are our family.

Ana Monnar

We are a motley bunch. But we more than make up for it with tenacity." ~ Ralston to Simon

Sarah MacLean

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

Richard Schiff

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

Philip Roth

It's so easy to focus on the anguish and the misery; it's harder, somehow, to acknowledge the positive, maybe for fear of jinxing it, bringing the nightmare back down on our heads.

Harriet Brown

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. tOh, Mary Lou.tMy baby.tMy love.

Pete Hamill

She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.

Maile Meloy

The Internet doesn’t love you or need you – but your family does.

James Chartrand

Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resurrection of Edward, she had one again.

Jane Austen

Wherever the family was, these two dogs, both six-year-old shepherd mixes, took up their posts at the central coming-and-going point. Gil called them concierge dogs. And it's true, they were inquisitive and accommodating. But they were not fawning or overly playful. They were watchful and thoughtful. Irene thought they had gravitas. Weighty demeanors. She thought of them as diplomats. She had noticed that when Gil was about to lose his temper one of the dogs always appeared and did something to divert his attention. Sometimes they acted like fools, but it was brilliant acting. Once, when he was furious about a bill for the late fees for a lost video, one of the dogs had walked right up to Gil and lifted his leg over his shoe. Gil was shouting at Florian when the piss splattered down, and she'd felt a sudden jolt of pride in the dog.

Louise Erdrich

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy culling.It was life, and death, and all that spanned between.It was his birthright.

Nenia Campbell

Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting his daughter is a simple declaration of: "Well, fuck.

Erin Morgenstern

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.

Winston S. Churchill

But they're family, and you forgive them, even if they are human equivalent of hyenas. Because that's what you do, Posey. Forgive.

Kristan Higgins

Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with.

Silas House

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed there, regardless.

Sarah Dessen

I've remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

Sharon Shinn

Scorned and torn, former love mates aim and shoot childish devastating daggers that penetrate beyond target to pierce the heart of their offspring.

T.F. Hodge

We're all family--the only family we've got. It doesn't have to be blood.

Holly Cupala

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

Oscar Wilde

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

Richard Ford

It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Gabrielle Zevin

Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I have cried many times about everything and how my relatives gave no support or love to me as a kid when this all came out. Not one relative ever came up to that innocent little girl I was and said "I am sorry for what you went through" or "I am here for you." Instead they said hurtful things: "Oh he was young." "That is what kids do." "It is not like he was some older man you didn't know." Why does age make a difference? It is a sick way of thinking. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. What is wrong with this picture? It brings tears to my eyes the way my relatives have reacted to this and cannot accept the truth. Denial is where they would rather stay.

Erin Merryn

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

Alice Sebold

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Family Quotes - Page 36

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