Quotes About Family

Greece was falling apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant. Their family didn't seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

Though Margaret has a South African accent and my mother retains a vaguely midwestern inflection, flecks of Yiddish float through both of their speech. They are the same size and shape (small, with fluffy silver heads of hair) and they both wear loose shirts and comfortable sandals.

At Emma's wedding, while we are eating the white cake together after my toast, she says, "Do you hate me for being pregnant?" And I tell her the truth. I feel that her child, in a lesser but still crucial way, will be mine, too. —

I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother's relationship with Marcus, Lucy's relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.

Finally there was a place—for everything! Lucy's garage-sale golf clubs. The quilt with yellow stars from my stepmother. Books that we'd read, that we hadn't yet read, that we'd never read, all on shelves. The things that for years had remained in our parents' homes while we went about our young adulthoods inhabiting small spaces in big cities we brought to that house, and they comforted us. We were home.

But mostly I learned to cook from my mother. There weren't any blintz-style lessons. I absorbed her preferences and prejudices over the years the way that I absorbed her gestures and her speech pattern, until ultimately my cooking tastes slightly but unmistakably like hers.

I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care.

EPOPS But, after all, what sort of city would please you best? EUELPIDES A place where the following would be the most important business transacted.—Some friend would come knocking at the door quite early in the morning saying, By Olympian Zeus, be at my house early, as soon as you have bathed, and bring your children too. I am giving a nuptial feast, so don't fail, or else don't cross my threshold when I am in distress.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are therir own

Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.

You don't really know for certain about a family until somebody dies. You don't know anything until that happens." She

It's clearer and clearer as I get older that sometimes people that you share blood with are not coming along with you on the ride.

Tirza, his youngest daughter, the one who turned out best. Turned out wonderfully, both inside and out.

Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

I've found it's harder for the family of the patient to accept what's happening. In most cases—not all—the dying person has accepted his fate.

I won't go to their gas chambers! And my children won't go to their gas chambers. Bibi! Lonia! Richieu! Come here quickly!

Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the second was an equally infallible method—as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood—of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration.

That is why Jean could tap the knowledge of her unborn son.

you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

A lot happens when the prince and princess live happily ever after--the king, his father, dies, so he is now ruler and she his queen, they have their children, she conducts discreet affairs with Sir Lancelot, there are border uprisings...but still the story ended when the love toward which their destinies drove them came to mutual consciousness when they knew, each knowing the other knew, that they were meant for each other.

My line of thoughts about dogs is analogous. 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. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.

better to be a repulsed lover than an accepted brother