Quotes About Family

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

Mami might have been skinny, a bad thing on the Island, but she was smart and funny and that's hard to find anywhere.

I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit. —It's ours too, he said.

One day while watching his mother tear sheets off the beds it dawned on him that the family curse he'd heard about his whole life might actually be true. Fukú. He rolled the word experimentally in his mouth. Fuck you.

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don't take after me. Dominican

She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.

This is how you treat your mother? she cried. And if I could have I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face, but instead I screamed back, And this is how you treat your daughter?

You don't know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around— especially the ones that are never around.

Mami said nothing for a while, and then she went into her bedroom. I figured she was going to emerge with my father's Saturday-night special, the one thing of his that she'd kept when he left. To protect us, she claimed, but more likely to shoot my father dead if she ever saw him again.

My brother had never been the most rational of agents, but this one was the ill zinger.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.

I want to be a young dad. By 25 or 26 I want to see myself, like, married or start looking for a family.

What is home but a place where you are truly known?

But he'd done far braver things in his life—all his life—not the least of which was warming another man's child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy.

he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He'd even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms

Our place had just four rooms and voices had a way of carrying, you couldn't sneeze in one room without somebody in another saying bless you.

Maybe that was what getting older taught you, when you looked in the mirror and saw the passage of time in your face, when you looked at your sleeping daughter and saw the girl you once were and would never be again. The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand thousand stories—of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in its body's keeping always longing to be known. She

It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.

If things had happened differently, they might have been just like any other brother and sister, their importance to one another fading over time as new connections took precedence. But not the two of them. New people would take the stage, but there would always be a room in their hearts in which only the two of them resided.

His old man, who'd smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he'd done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.

An unanticipated longing washed over him; how he wished his father were here. For weeks he had kept this feeling at bay. Holding his son in his arms, he could no longer. Tears poured from his eyes.

They always come home.