Quotes About Family

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.

I said on the phone to my mother, "I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids." "It's a good one," she agreed. "People will say it's not nice to write about people I know." My mother was tired that night. She yawned. "Well, you don't know them," she said. "Nobody ever knows anyone.

you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children

But there is this: Both with the discovery of David's illness, and then again with his death, it was William I called first. I think—but I don't remember—that I must have said something like "Oh William, help me." Because he did. He got my husband to a different doctor—a better one, I do believe—although there was nothing any doctor could do at that point. And then, with the death, William helped me again.

I felt terrible for this man who used to be my husband. We talked a long time about Estelle and Bridget, and then a little bit about our girls; he asked that he be the one to tell Chrissy and Becka about Estelle leaving, and I said, Of course.

don't you make pancakes?" It was a family custom to have pancakes

At David's service in a funeral home in the city—which was then, and is now, all a blur to me—I do remember Becka whispering to me, "Dad wishes he could sit up here with us." "He said that to you?" I asked, turning to look at her, and she nodded solemnly. Poor William, I thought.

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.

She could make the bed, do the laundry, feed the dog. But she could not be bothered with any more meals. "What'll we have for supper?" Henry would ask, coming upstairs from the basement. "Strawberries.

The truth is, Olive, Amy is good to me, but she does live in Iowa, and I sometimes think when a child moves that far away they're really trying to get away from something, and in this case I suspect it's me.

And I thought how when William came into money from his grandfather who had profited from the war, and Catherine was still alive at that time, she had said very little about it. But she did say to me, lying on the tangerine couch, not long after this had happened, "It's dirty money. He should give it all away." But William did not give it all away; he became very rich.

Hello, Olive," he said, walking to her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away. He told her the Thibodeaus were coming for supper. "It's only right," he said. Olive wiped sweat from her upper lip, turned to rip up a clump of onion grass. "Then that's that, Mr. President," she said. "Give your order to the cook.

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.

Throughout my marriage to William, I had had the image—and this was true even when Catherine was alive, and more so after she died—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.

I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us--off-kilter as we had been--was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended...I saw how our roots were so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My husband said, "But you didn't even like them." And I felt especially frightened after that.

But with my mother I didn't dare cry. Both my parents loathed the act of crying, and it's difficult for a child who is crying to have to stop, knowing if she doesn't stop everything will be made worse. This is not an easy position for any child.

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

Married and divorced, three beautiful daughters, two in college. The other one is 16, lives with her mom. I'm 46, I've worked for the Post Office for 18 years, seven facilities in three states.

What most viewers wanted, he believed, was the answers to three basic questions: Is the world safe? Are my home and family safe? Did anything happen today that was interesting?

Then one day he returned from school to learn he was going to be married. He was thirteen—certainly not too young for the prearranged marital match that was considered essential to a Hindu household. His bride Kasturbai Makanji, also thirteen, was the daughter of a merchant who lived only a few doors down from the Gandhis' old house in Porbandar.

Another task was emptying the house's chamber pots, a constant chore in a large house with a wife and three children, including his nephew, twelve servants and staff, and only one indoor toilet.

their reliance on a loyal circle of uncles and aunts, nephews and sons-in-law, to pool capital and lay off risk.

Using one's eyes and ears and sense of touch to diagnose ailments and complaints, and judge the course of a disease or its cure, was in a sense a family tradition. According to the great Greek doctor Galen,‡ Asclepid families also taught their sons dissection.

Being "civilized" had originally meant living under Roman, or "civil," law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.