Quotes About Family

Like art, sex is fraught with symbols. Family romance (Freud) means that adult sex is always representation, ritualistic acting out of vanished realities.

I tell Ki that I'm learning about words and stories to help our family. He says he's protecting our family with his knife. Who is right? Which is best, protecting with words or with his knife? She is instant, certain, and solemn, and there is no misunderstanding her meaning. Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil with your knife. Tell you husband, Ki, that he is right.

His mother had become impossible, as, he supposed, all elderly people were when they refused to accept that their lives had to change.

So, while the spouse-child hides out in his "home office"—a misnomer since he's never produced any actual work there—his

Marilyn, I have a wife and family and a dog and a cat.

Watching the cab speed off, Wahoo's father looked forlorn. "It's like she's leaving us twice," he remarked. "What are you talking about, Pop?" "I'm seein' double, remember? There she goes—and there she goes again.

Elle m'appelle encore ton ex-père? -Ça lui arrive , répondit Fry. D'autres fois c'est juste ton vaurien de narcotrafiquants de père.

Mick Stranahan's sister was married to a lawyer named Kipper Garth, inept in all aspects of the profession except self-promotion.

The family was jolted when, at age fifty-three, Huff Cornbright perished on an autumn steelhead trip to British Columbia. Swept downstream while wading the Dean River, he foolishly clung to his twelve-hundred-dollar fly rod rather than reach for a low-hanging branch and haul himself to safety.

Okay, I'll adopt a kid. That would be huge. No, three kids! Tell Maury to get all over it.' 'Honey, no,' Janet Bunterman said. She endeavored to squelch the idea without stating the obvious: that her daughter was unfit to care for a goldfish, much less a child.

his mother wanted him closer to home. The funeral had been

I didn't tell my parents what happened because they would've freaked and gone straight to Dusty Muleman, or maybe even the police, which was not how I wanted to handle it.

I'm sure I'll hear from Daddy, soon as he needs his laundry done. That's the usual program. He's the king of fake tears and phony apologies.

She said, 'you think I'm a whore?' 'Don't be ridiculous.' Erin stepped back from the water. 'But you wouldn't want your daughter doing what I do.' 'My daughter,' said Garcia, 'is not leaving the house until she's thirty years old.

The whereabouts of the other Nance brothers-- Clee Roy, Buddy, and Junior--had been ascertained. They were chilling at the forty-acre Pensacola estate leased by the network and used as an outdoor set for the fractious family barbecue scenes that closed each episode. Down the road a stretch was the rooster farm, which the clan avoided except during taping days, because of the stench.

Buck was no fan of Hispanics, but he couldn't bear listening to Blister berate the driver. When Buck was a boy, he'd overheard his father speak to a Puerto Rican auto mechanic the same way, and he remembered feeling uneasy and possibly ashamed. True, he and his brothers had grown up to be racist dickheads like their old man, but they weren't in-your-face racist dickheads.

When my experiences with dogs and other animals—and people—were fewer, I used to think it silly for people to speak of dogs as "family" or other animals as "friends." Now I feel it's silly not to. I'd overestimated the loyalty and staying power of humans and underestimated the intelligence and sensitivity of other animals. I think I understand both better. Their gifts overlap, though they are different gifts.

Poor people don't want to stay poor. But there's a misconception that it's somehow unfair to poor people, or, worse, racist, to let them in on the main secret of wealthy, educated and successful people: smaller families mean larger lives.

It's been said that no two species are more alike than wolves and humans. If you watch wolves not just in all their beauty and adaptability but in all their brutality, it's hard to escape that conclusion. Living as we do in family packs, fending off the human wolves among us, managing the wolves within us, we can easily recognize in real wolves their social dilemmas and their status quests. No wonder Native Americans saw wolves as a sibling spirit.

Beneath the skin, kin.

When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn't just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths.

A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound emanated from a speaker hidden in the thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead's elephant daughter called for days afterword. The researchers never again did such a thing.

If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort?

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.