Quotes About Family

The particular human chain we're part of is central to our individual identity. Even if we loathe our families, in order to know ourselves, we seem to need to know about them, just as prologue. Not to know is to live with some of the disorientation and anxiety of the amnesiac.

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.

Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".

A lot of people don't have families. . . . . But they still have homes.

Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: this is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

Silly little plastic belt, made for a skinny pinny; it could barely tie around her. She managed, though - a tiny white bow. Waiting, she folded her hands and realized how every single time she went by this hospital, the same two thoughts occurred to her: that she'd been born here and that her father's body had been brought here after his suicide. She'd been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too.

Why do you need everyone married?" Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. "Why can't you just leave people alone?" He doesn't want people alone.

She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven't wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son.

My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: "Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and...did it." Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don't know what my mother meant.

But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We're all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it's okay.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil.

Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.

no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father's ambitions.

Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that.

So often I had the private image of William and me as Hansel and Gretel. Two small kids lost in the woods, looking for the breadcrumbs that could lead us home. ... Being with Hansel, even if we were lost in the woods, made me feel safe.

She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.

If she were Catholic, she could kneel, kneel and bow her head inside a church with brilliant stained-glass windows and streaks of golden light falling over her. Yes, oh yes, she would kneel and stretch out her arms, holding to her Amy and Dottie and Bev.

Walking down the sidewalk I thought how my mother had never said I love you to me, and I thought how Chrissy had been going to call the baby Lucy. She loved me, my daughter! Even knowing this, I was surprised. In truth, I was amazed.

oh, I can't really explain what I thought! But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don't know what my mother remembered either.

The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.

I have never seen anything as beautiful as those girls. These women. My daughters!