Quotes About Family

As I looked at [my future husband] I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.

and when nanas die they leave grandchildren and perhaps a trace memory of being coddled, kissed, attended to, and loved, of being chased across the lawn or rocked in the middle of the night or taken seriously. In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

It's a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.

Because I'm learning that being a grandmother is not about the things you have to do. It's about the things you want to do. The fact is that motherhood is mainly about requirements.

Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that's quite subjective: have you raised good people?

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.

The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

But once there were children, you couldn't zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

Their children, their dogs, and housing prices: the holy trinity of conversation for New Yorkers of a certain sort. For the men, there were also golf courses and wine lists to be discussed; for the women, dermatologists.

Being a parent is not transactional. We do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward: We are good parents, not so they will be loving enough to stay with us, but so they will be strong enough to leave us.

No matter what the police and the district attorney said, no matter what the papers wrote, no matter what people believed then and still believe, these years later, the truth is that I did not kill my mother. I only wished I had.

But the truth is I didn't really think she had it in her. And being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.

My husband and I have together created three children, but we have separate finances, and that's the way I like it.

When she got older, my mother, who was not a sentimental type at all, started to play around with poems. They weren't very good poems, but at every occasion she would write a poem and give it to us. And those are completely and utterly treasured." Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever.

It is interesting to discover how many people are disconcerted not because their parents are bad grandparents but because they are better grandparents than they were mothers and fathers.

And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest. I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn't be true, and it wouldn't be true of anyone I know, either.

No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

I Remember how we put in a security system to keep intruders out of the house, and how we only used it when we went on vacations. It didn't matter: OUr intruder had a place at our table, kew where we hid the Easter eggs and where we'd buried the pet guinea pigs, was so familiar that when I saw him in the bedroom doorway that last time I thought he was my own son, come to kill me.

One of his favorite words now is "Pop." There's no question that it feels good in his mouth, but it's not just that. In the way these things usually go in the house of family, Nana is wallpaper and Pop is a chandelier. "Pop! Pop!" he shouts now, searching for his grandfather.

If a marriage is to endure over time, it has to be because both people within it have tacitly acknowledged something that young lovers might find preposterous: it's bigger, and more important, than both of us. It's love, sure, and inside jokes and conversational shorthand. But it's also families, friends, traditions, landmarks, knowledge, history.

It's children, children whose parents' marriage is bedrock for them even if they're not children anymore. Perhaps especially if they're not children anymore.