Quotes About Family

And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette's and their house on rue de l'Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands--smaller. She'd hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne's mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely--and how could she resent this?

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality.

Many toxic parents compare one sibling unfavorably with another to make the target child feel that he's not doing enough to gain parental affection. This motivates the child to do whatever the parents want in order to regain their favor. This divide-and-conquer technique is often unleashed against children who become a little too independent, threatening the balance of the family system.

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix.

The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in their outcome: pain and suffering.

In families like Fred's, much of a child's identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can't stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships.

Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges—indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents' behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.

Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame.

Aren't you going to look at it, Verity?" asked Miss Deane. Slowly, I unwrapped it. I saw a small, slim girl with serious eyes and a little pointed face, wearing her second-best dress and posed stiffly beside an artificial rosebush. Standing behind her, rising out of a sort of mist, was a fair-haired young man in a white shirt. There was no doubt as to who it was. It was my half-brother Alexander, and he was smiling.

He didn't know why I was laughing. "What is so funny, chérie?" "What's lost is found, darling Papa," I said, kissing him ever so gently. "At last, what's lost is found.

Where there's life, there's hope," I said. Hope. How I'd needed it, in those dark days when it seemed that Papa would never be found, dead or alive. I thought of Alexander again. "Thank you," I whispered.

Come on," said Papa. "Let's go home.

Yet intimations of mortality whispered something else in my ear—namely, that I will love my family and friends until death departs, and since death will never depart, I will love them always and forever.

Terry Tempest Williams: "I look at Mother and I see myself," she writes during her period of caretaking; or worse: "A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them.

No, indeed. I wasn't expecting it at all, so all I could do was stammer that I had no plans of marrying so young and that I was quite happy in my present state of life. He stomped off, but that wasn't the end of it. The next day, he came back in a drunken rage and threatened to drink my heart's blood—charming image, isn't it?—and my mother's too. I have no idea what made him drag her into it.

he told me, married and with a child of his own.

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families.

and daughters who are so hopeless at doing the done thing and sticking to the rules are automatically paralyzed with guilt whenever they come within fifty yards of a mother like Margaret.

Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before.

An offspring's sigh of tedium is inaudible to all human ears except a parent's. Boring your child who, at one point in his or her life, found you unspeakably delightful is humbling.

No," I said. "He's a Rabinowitz. He's a semi-decent

weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations -- many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.

If you rock the boat in a fragile family, the concern is that everyone will drown. "Hmmm

Our families are often the thing that keep us stuck