Quotes About Family

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.

You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.

and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

Number 4: the tall, derelict bird's nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.

split by the knobs of her vertebrae. She used to fall asleep holding his index finger in her fist. She used to sprawl with her books beneath the key pound bench and move her hands like spiders across the pages. "Am I to stay here?" "With Madame. And Etienne." He hands her a towel and helps her climb onto the tile and waits outside

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right. Though in Werner's weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she's the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense.

I thought they might take a break," he says. Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. "Maybe," she says, "it is even more important now?

Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

One step behind her, her father tilts his head up and gives the sky a huge smile. Marie-Laure knows this even though her back is to him, even though he says nothing, even though she is blind - Papa's thick wet hair is wet from the snow and standing in a dozen angles off his head, and his scarf is draped asymmetrically over his shoulders, and he's beaming up at the falling snow (41).

Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty feet away his daughter was in her bed, reeling, thinking it out, a thousand betrayals and loves and resentments riding the synapses between brain and heart and back again.

Werner thinks of home all the time. He misses the sound of rain on the zinc roof above his dormer; the feral energy of the orphans; the scratchy singing of Frau Elena as she rocks a baby in the parlor. The smell of the coking plant coming in under the dawn, the first reliable smell of every day. Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right.

Anthony Doerr

He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.

If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.

If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.

he thinks [...] as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

Before she turns fourteen, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead.

Cada minuto que passa é um minuto a menos nesta casa. Nesta vida.

Tantrums, doctor's appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist's office in Boise

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only thing that keeps your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.