Quotes About Family

It is within this space that revelations come, and mine is this: there's only one thing I can do to help my father now, something I have never done before. I kiss him on the forehead. "I love you," I tell him.

If being a parent taught you one thing, it was that you could worry all you wanted, but it wouldn't change a thing.

In the Macomb household, cocktail hour was religion.

and the thought came to me then that who we are to one another isn't so easy to categorize after all: that fathers can be sons, and lovers friends, and daughters mothers, and that such words as these tell only half the story, maybe not even half.

Loving their boy was just another way of loving each other.

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

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

Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a 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 it's body keeping always longing to be known.

Were you born in a barn? I must have been, mom asked me so often... You would've thought she would know if anyone did!

Maybe home isn't a place. Maybe it's a feeling you have inside of you, being around the people who matter to you

We're so determined to help those we love that we lose all perspective

Mom was crying while she cooked, salting domesticity with anguish, the recipe of her life.

I saw Mom the way she had been and could have been and was becoming in these days free of Dad.

I thought about Mom as she huffed at my side, trying so hard to keep up. How many times had I wanted to cringe when she begged Dad for every little thing: extra money for Christmas groceries so the boys could have their favorite meal — filet mignon for Claudius, rack of lamb for Merc. The car to bring me to the dermatologist. She never asked for anything for herself, yet without any hesitation, she'd humble herself for us.

Throughout history, wars were won and lost based on maps — who had the best maps, who had the inaccurate ones, who owned the boundary lines, who knew the terrain. And I knew the terrain of my family intimately, our private fears, our embarrassing weaknesses, our cached secrets.

Even overeating — like Mom — wasn't that a rebellion that in the end only hurt us?

Mom doing things for herself was the best souvenir we could have brought back from China.

While our mothers rode the escalators up to baggage claim, Jacob and I took the stairs, racing each other. "No fair," I said, as we started. "You've got longer legs." Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, grabbed Mom's spillover purchases that I had stuffed into one of his extra carry-ons. "Take your excuses somewhere else, Trouble Magnet.

But she had a lot to think about, and only she could figure out what she wanted to do with this olive branch Dad was extending to her, whether she'd snap it like a twig or accept it and hope it'd flourish.

What's wrong?" Jacob asked, already jogging down the steps, his hand stretched out to lighten my load if I needed it. "Hey, you okay?" No. I was a liar. And a cheater. And a coward. No different from his barista of a stepmother and his philanderer of a father.

We'd been gone for eleven days, and the first thing Dad had to say when he finally deigned to notice us from where he was sitting in the kitchen, reading his newspaper? "What are we having for dinner?

I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?

I took her hand in mine, not the way I used to hold hers as a child, but with our fingers woven together. And we strode through the archway of emperors and into the open -- hand in hand, my mother and I.