Quotes About Family

As for Dad, he was supposed to live forever. The one who could open all the jar lids nobody else could, who fixed whatever was broken, was supposed to do that forever. The man who let me sit on his shoulders, climb on his back, chase me around while making monster noises, throw me in the air and catch me, spin me around so much that I felt dizzy and fell over laughing.

When you fall on the ground really hard and you can't figure out whether it hurts or not you look to your parents. If they look worried and rush towards you, you cry. If they laugh and smack the ground saying, 'Bold ground,' then you pick yourself up and get on with it.

Oh! It is dreadful...that one is almost always separated from those ones loves dearly and is encumbered with those one dislikes. -Queen Victoria

It's fine." Brett shrugged, suppressing the urge to say something like, "The drugs are okay, but the sex is lousy." But she didn't want her suddenly nun-like sister to have a heart attack before Brett got a chance to pump her for information.

In fact, the problem with having a family at all was that nobody noticed if you were dead or alive until dinner went unmade and they found your torso floating in the dirty water behind Ikea.

I am the youngest of 14 children, so I rarely got a chance to speak. If I have an opportunity for talking, I talk

After choosing Mr. Green, I asked Brooke if she could find me a towel or cloth that carried the scent of his canine family of origin, to help ease his transition from his first pack into my pack. Brooke did much more than that.

Don't introduce an excited child to a puppy. Teach your kids early about the concept of calm-assertive energy.

I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.

Take care of your father, he said. There aren't many people like him around anymore.

If conquest is the only reason for a war, conquest from which only the ruler stands to gain, then people should refuse to fight. If, however, a war is to be fought for the defense of one's family and property, then men should fight with all their heart and might.

Devorah told me, "Our daughter is grown," and there were tears in her eyes.

I drew that memory of my father on the roof...I drew him in all the small and quiet ways I had never thought to draw him before. And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.

My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.

It hurts a father to see a son this way. It makes no difference what age the son is; it hurts.

Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, No, no! as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight.

She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.

Or maybe another baby might have helped us. Another try. Of course, that's the worst reason to have a child, anyone on the street can tell you that, because no one can handle being an attempt at something from the very start, (1998: 200)

Don't shame him! Your father is very proud. You don't know this, but he graduated from the best college in Korea, the very top, and he doesn't need to talk about selling fruits and vegetables. It's below him. He only does it for you, Byong-ho, he does everything for you. Now go and keep him company...I would learn in subsequent years that he had been trained as an industrial engineer, and had actually completed a master's degree.

My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own. This is way I learn business, this is way they learn business.

I still imagine Mr. Kim's and Mr. Yoon's children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought home to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, those exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyful fruit now too soft and too sweet for those of us who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans.

I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement.

I walked back to the living room and found my father asleep on the sofa, his round mouth pursed and tightly shut, his breath filtering softly through his nose. A single fly, its armored back an oily, metallic green, was dancing a circle on his chin. What he'd brought home from work.

The only noticeable thing was that he would come home much earlier than usual, maybe four in the afternoon instead of the usual eight or nine. He said he didn't want me coming home from school to an empty house, though he didn't actually spend any more time with me.