Quotes About Family

Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you.

My mother danced all night and Roberta's was sick.

His sister was gutted, infertile, but not beaten. She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting. Frank tried to sort out what else was troubling him and what to do about it.

There was no point in questioning him. Just as long ago, when they ventured hand in hand into unknown territory, Cee accompanied her big brother silently. As annoyed as she was now at her relapse into doing what others wanted, she nevertheless cooperated. This one time, she told herself. I don't want Frank making decisions for me.

Yummy food, unique attention, playfulness, or loving sternness—these features are often summoned to sweeten one's memory of a grandmother.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children.

And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human.

Era peligroso que una mujer que había sido esclava amara tanto algo, especialmente si ese algo eran sus propios hijos. Él sabía que lo mejor era querer un poquito, quererlo todo pero solo un poquito, de modo que cuando les rompieran la espalda o los arrojaran en un saco de desperdicios, te quedara un poco de amor para el siguiente

Of particular interest were those printed in the nineteenth century when my grandfather spent his few minutes at school.

The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep. They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence—and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to nestle like plums under the limbs of their men.

she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

When he visited his and Adam's old bedroom, the thread of disapproval he'd felt during his proposal of a memorial became a rope, as he saw the savage absence not only of Adam but of himself. So when he shut the door on his family and stepped out into the rain it was an already belated act.

clarity about who one is and what one's work is, is inextricably bound up with one's place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture.

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

He left me his violin.

Here is the house.

Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget. She's got a big-time job in California but she don't call or visit anymore. She sends me money and stuff every now and then, but I ain't seen her in I don't know how long.

As long as your feet are under my table, you'll do in this house what you are told.

Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. "You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don't remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps? My Jesus my." But you said there was no defense. "There ain't." Then what do I do? "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.

Every night. Well, she burnin up down there now, her and her nasty daughter…

We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our Innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.

He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents' past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well.