Quotes About Family

Because there had to be something wrong, didn't there, if even your own mother didn't really love you?

So Lily's mouth would open and nothing would come out, then Louisa would start rattling on about meeting her grandmother or whether she had eaten something and she had realized she was on her own.

Alice tried not to think too hard about the previous evening. She had once been told by her favorite aunt that the best way to get through life was not to dwell on things so she packed those events

There was no such thing as happiness, she thought, if one of your children was miserable. She

wondering how she could be in a house full of people and also in the loneliest place on earth.

I'm dying, Louisa. I'm an old woman and I'm not going to get an awful lot older, and my son, who I thought was lost to me, has been gracious enough to swallow his pain and his pride and reach out. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it is to have someone do that for you?

I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous.

It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man—the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring—you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one. I

do not let whatever happened with that foolish family next door dim your light. You are a courageous, gorgeous, tremendously kind little creature and I shall be forever grateful that their loss has been my gain. Thank you.

she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over.

Most of the time, I was reasonably content with my life. I had been to enough group sessions now to know that it was important to be grateful for simple pleasures. I was healthy. I had my family again. I was working.

Just because they're wealthy doesn't make them better parents.

He's a singular person, Will. From the time he hit adolescence, I always had to fight the feeling that in his eyes I had somehow done something wrong. I've never been quite sure what it was.

Want to know the true definition of the triumph of hope over experience?" he would say. "Plan a fun family day out.

About music, and people, and things we'd done and wanted to do, and I never worried about whether I was going to say the wrong thing or offend someone because he just "got" me, you know? And now I've moved to London and I'm sort of on my own, apart from my family, and talking to them is always... tricky.

I was good at keeping secrets from my parents (it's one of the things we learn while growing up, after all)—but coping with the anxiety by myself was something else entirely.

I supposed I would probably marry Patrick, knock out a few kids, live a few streets away from where I had always lived. Apart from an exotic taste in clothes, and the fact that I'm a bit short, there's not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn't look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.

I can't delete my brother's voice mail message. I have a little listen to his voice when I feel like I'm going to forget what he sounds like.

My aunt Lina will be waiting there with her apron open, ready to catch the head. She makes the best souse—that's from the tongue, ears and feet—this side of the Cumberland Gap. But my favorite part of the whole day, since I was small, is when Daddy tips all the innards into a tub and we get to choose the best bit to roast.

I felt grateful for my parents. I felt an almost umbilical pull towards home, the comfort offered by a traditional family and Sunday lunch on the table.

When they told me in the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity.

I don't want to have to feel the weight of my mother's carefully disguised disapproval, of my father's cheerful determination that it's all okay, everything is just fine, as if saying it enough times will actually make it okay.

you made us feel safe. And loved. I liked you being there every day when we came home.

The last time you pick up your child. The last time you hug a parent. The last time you cook dinner in a house full of the people you love.