Quotes About Family

The two people I like most—outside my family—have secrets that I don't ask about. Momma says it's a flaw. She says I should be more interested; that people like to be asked about themselves. I should find out what made them who they are. I look at Shoogy and Bobby and think it doesn't matter 'cause the past doesn't always make sense of the present.

Only their efforts to make him talk failed. He would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line. Gradually, as his family learnt how to anticipate his few needs and how to respond, they ceased to notice his silence—his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them: he no more needed to converse than Aunt Mira's cat did.

The well then contained death as it once contained merely water, frogs and harmless floating things. The horror of that death by drowning lived in the area behind the carvanda hedge like a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness waiting to re-emerge. It was a blot, a black and stinking blot.

It was not spite or retaliation that made Tara abandon Bim — it was the spider fear that lurked at the center of the web-world for Tara. Yet she did abandon Bim, it was true that she did.

He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter.

And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other.

I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of that life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together as a tightly knotted fisherman's net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been unraveled. During

Grace wonders if Tom and Claire will one day visit her and have a similar sensation of home. Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit

to talk at length about her mother and father, whom she has not seen since their deaths in the late 1800s. The greatest insight to emerge from those sessions was that Etna

gave up her child without so much as a note or a dollar, and what excuse did she have? None. She was not poor. She was not the victim of brutality. And the child, whatever else his circumstances, had been conceived in love. That much was true. How could she have so easily given the child away? Olympia

her feet and legs. The children are silent, as if awed by the sound. "A fuel tank in a house on Seventh Street," she

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.

I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first. (Riley to her sister Alice about Paul)

I told him that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first.

I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.

Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly.

Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one.

It was their mothers, long ago. Tibby noted with joy that all four of them were wearing jeans.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who'd missed everything.

By day she studied and touched her mother's things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together