Quotes About Family

Within the walls of our own homes, we can and should bear pure testimony of the divinity and reality of the Father and the Son, of the great plan of happiness, and of the Restoration.

My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.

Every job is important because each one represents an American's livelihood and ability to raise a family. Yet spending our time building walls around America will do nothing to help us compete for the millions of new jobs being created.

I guess I figured out my dad was a fight coordinator pretty early, because I always saw him running into walls and stuff and nobody got mad at him, but it took me a lot longer to figure out what Mom did, because it was usually stuff on the telephone.

I grew up in a house my parents built together on a mountain in Tennessee. When we moved in, the walls were still going up, we didn't have hot water, and we turned it into an amazing adventure.

Children need to have a home. I don't mean a physical four walls and a room. There needs to be an emotional and spiritual and loving place in life. That's what a family is.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.

The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.

We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren't smiling all the time. I don't want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain.

Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.

My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

My dad had a guitar that he gave me. I went to Walmart and bought a chord chart and hung it up in my room, and I was just trying to figure out how to play the guitar and put words with what I was learning.

My parents were working class folks. My dad was a bartender for most of his life, my mom was a maid and a cashier and a stock clerk at WalMart. We were not people of financial means in terms of significant financial means. I always told them, 'I didn't always have what I wanted. I always had what I needed.' My parents always provided that.

My mum was working in Walmart for €350 per month, about £280. My father was working as a house painter. We had a difficult situation with money.

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren't very successful.

If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We'd raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together.

What scares me? I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe they can wander around, so that scares me. But the stuff that really scares me are the catastrophic events like my husband or children or my family being harmed, or something like that.

My father was a good man, but he was a con man. He was a wanderer, nomadic.

My mother was the total influence. My father was what we call a nomadic person; he was a wanderer.

Your roots, your family, your friends all become so much more important to you as you get older, especially if you are a wandering minstrel like me.

'The Waltons' was profoundly important after years of wandering around. I was 44 and cut off from family and friends. It nurtured me back to a sense of family and who I am. It was a transforming experience.