Quotes About Family

They are dead, all of them. I am caught and tangled around by their doings. It is as if their lives left a weaving of invisible threads in the air of this house, of this town, of this county. And I stumbled and fell into them.

And isn't it funny, she thought, that it takes two generations to kill off a man? ... First him, and then his memory. . . .

Ah, yes, tea. Our family's first line of defense when meeting a disaster.

Oh Constance, we are so happy.

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.

Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky. 'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.' 'I told you that you would like it on the moon.

The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.

Sister's gone to school, I said to Sally. Ah, said Sally. And will she come home again?

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

Sally at this time gave up any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself Tiger and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed.

Where did he go, your father?' 'Africa.' 'What for?' 'To shoot lions, of course.' 'What on Earth for ?' said Mrs. Willow blankly. 'Some people shoot lions,' the girl said pleasantly, 'and some people do not shoot lions. My father is one of the people who do.

I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die." Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. "The way you did before?" she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. "Yes," I said after a minute, "the way I did before.

I personally preferred to chance the arsenic," Uncle Julian said.

My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went.

I remember coming home from school with friends who were startled at the percussive sound of my parents' typewriters both going at once, pounding away in different rooms.

I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.

I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children

I am walking on their bodies, I thought, we are having lunch in the garden and Uncle Julian is wearing his shawl.

During all of dinner the singing went on upstairs, and no one said a word.