Quotes About Family

Given good yarn, good workmanship, and good care, a knitted shawl and outlive its knitter, providing warmth and pleasure to several generations of family and friends.

After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

Consider the Jewish joke, with the old lady running distractedly along the seashore: Help! My son the doctor is drowning. Amusing, I suppose. Her pride, I suppose, is amusing: it is greater than her love.

In the end, it's not your Nobel Prize you're thinking of, it's not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It's your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it's your wives, your children, and how things went with them.

The father is dying, as did his (and as did his).

Early financial anxiety combined with an engrained family belief that the Buonarroti were really grander than their current circumstances would suggest goes some way to explaining Michelangelo's eccentricities. In later life he showed a strong, indeed neurotic, desire for money together with an equally powerful urge not to spend it.

I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, Martin, Martin, come quickly! I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: Darling, it's empty!

Whatever I was, I owed to my family and to all those who struggled with me. But my biggest debt I owed to my wife. She was the one who gave my life meaning. All I could pledge to her, and to all those millions, was that I would do all I could to justify the faith that she, and they, had in me. I would try more than ever to make my life one of which she, and they, could be proud. I would do in private that which I knew my public responsibility demanded.

Daddy," the boy said, "I don't want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I'll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I'm not doing this only because I want to be free. I'm doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die.

Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife. The law court may force him to provide bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love.

No one can understand my conflict who has not looked into the eyes of those he loves, knowing that he has no alternative but to take a dangerous stand that leaves them tormented.

Coleman: It's always the best ones go to hell. Me, probably straight to heaven I'll go, even though I blew the head off poor dad. So long as I go confessing to it anyways. That's the good thing about being Catholic. You can shoot your dad in the head and it doesn't even matter at all.

Doctor Where's your mammy now? Johnny At home she is. (Pause.) Lying at the foot of me stairs. Doctor What's she doing lying at the foot of your stairs? Johnny Nothing. Just lying. Ah she seems happy enough. She has a pint with her. Doctor How did she get lying at the foot of your stairs? Johnny Be falling down them! How d'ya usually get lying at the foot of a fella's stairs? Doctor And you just left her there? Johnny Is it my job to go picking her up? Doctor It is!

A church hall in semi-darkness. Bobby, Mammy (bottle in hand), Johnny, Helen, Bartley, Eileen and Kate sitting.

GIRLEEN: Coleman. Father Welsh Walsh Welsh... WELSH: Welsh. GIRLEEN: Welsh. I know. Don't be picking me up. How is all? COLEMAN: We've just stuck our dad in the ground. GIRLEEN: Grand, grand. I met the postman on the road with a letter for Valene.

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

It's never the same, drinking with your father," said Yevgeny and poured himself another vodka. "It's like kissing your sister; your heart isn't in it.

When I think of the confessions I hear of hatred and malice toward relatives over inheritance, I come close to despair.

One day she would recall this very twilit evening and the sight of her children dancing on the shore and then... Yes, then she would wish she had stopped to hold their chubby hands and play tag along with them.

I wouldn't be worth my salt as a mother if I didn't pass on the family recipes.

A mother never hears the words "I hate you" without cringing and feeling like a hopeless failure.

A woman saw those turtle tears and instinctively knew that the turtle mother wept for her children. A mother knew of all the predators that awaited her young, of the swift currents that might lead them astray, of the dazzle of dangerous lights, of the complicated nets that could entangle them and of the many years of solitary swimming. She wept because she could not protect them from their fate.

Her love for Mamaw had always been like that porch light, the one true shining light in her heart when the world proved dark and scary.

When she died, what would matter except that she loved and was loved in return?