Quotes About Family

If I know Mom,' she said, 'she'd have refused any surgery anyhow.' 'It's true,' Amanda said. 'Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.

Morris. Mercy filed the name in her memory. So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person's life, once that person had children.

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy. She

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.

You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers: No message. Harpo." That made him grin. Sarah said, "You would think it was funny." "Well? Isn't it?

Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean's edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years? Although Denny might not be okay, even now. Abby

The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy. She circled the hall to close the door to

Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother's absences—her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.

When she grew up she was going to marry a man who came from a big, close, jolly family. He would get along with all of them—he'd be the same kind of man her father was

Thinking time," their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person's eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann

Oh, a French braid," Greta said. "That's it. And then when she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples, little leftover squiggles, for hours and hours afterward." "Yes…" "Well," David said, "that's how families work, too. You think you're free of them, but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever." Greta started laughing.

big, and when you all come to visit it's too small." "We'll be fine

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years?

He had been forty-three years old—too young to think of making funeral plans. So all of that was left to Willa

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed. Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn't screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!

He didn't talk about Derek at all and he avoided any contact with Willa or his brother, instead spending his evenings shut away in his room twiddling tunelessly on his guitar. Sean was the opposite: he followed Willa around pestering her for every detail of his father's death.

She'd been so intent on not turning into her mother, she had gone and turned into her father.

She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her." ? Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

So, this is how it works," she said. "This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," he said. "And little cruelties," she agreed, and she swung his hand between them. He

You did mess them up!' And she had her hairbrush in her hand because I guess she'd been doing her hair and she started hitting me in the head with it, slam on one side of my head, slam on the other side, and I was ducking away and shielding my head—" "Yes, well," Willa said, "it's true she could be—" "You know what's the saddest thing about kids whose mothers are mean to them? It's that even so, their

You almost died," a nurse told her. But that was nonsense. Of course she wouldn't have died; she had children. When you have children, you're obligated to live.