Quotes About Family

The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other.

Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Johnny looked at her. "I think we can't make people love us." "Including our parents?" Especially our parents.

this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.

A year ago, Elsa would have thought it insane that any woman would think to walk from Oklahoma or Texas or Alabama to California, especially pushing a baby carriage. Now she knew better. When your children were dying, you did anything to save them, even walk over mountains and across deserts.

Home is part of us. It's in the scars we have on our knees and elbows, in the memories that surface when we sleep. I don't think you can ever really leave.

It didn't matter how you lost a parent or how great or shitty that parent was, a kid grieved forever.

I'm here, Mom," Julien says quietly, taking my suitcase, lifting it easily over the obstruction. The sound of his voice reminds me that I am a mother and mothers don't have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.

There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Now, she listens and agrees, and then goes on, talking about the gift of mistakes and the miracle of family. She hopes that people will learn from her bad choices. And she wraps that spell around them, the one only she can spin, and by the end of the show, her listeners are reaching for tissues and thinking about how to find their way back to their own families. The smart ones are reaching for the telephone.

In that quiet, Ruby heard the echo of a broken family; they were individual pieces, now separate, wanting a wholeness that had been shattered.

Mama takes Vera in her arms, holding her so hard that neither can breathe. There is only silence between them; in that silence, memories pass back and forth like dye in water, moving and fluid, and when they pull back and look at each other, Vera understands. They will not speak of Olga again, not for a long time, not until the sharp pain rounds into something that can be handled.

Nina lowered the camera slowly, feeling naked suddenly, vulnerable. Without that thin layer of a glass lens, she was here instead of there, looking at her father, who was dying.

They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

In a breathtaking instant, Cora's life crashed into focus, became small. There was just one thing that mattered; how could she not have known it from the beginning? Why had she spent so much time searching for who she was? She should have known. Always. From the very beginning. She was a mother. A mother.

In rooms scented by dust, leather, and stone, she turns in the last of her father's dreams for her - that she will become a writer - she hands it in like an overdue book and takes joy in the words of others.

I see the incredulity in my son's eyes and it makes me smile. Our children see us so imperfectly.

Sometimes when you open the door to your mother's past, you find your own future.

is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.

What in the world was more restorative than a child's love?

We have always been the witnesses of each other's lives. Isn't that what family is? Even broken and betrayed and bleeding, we are connected.

I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.

She knew it was wrong to be angry with her mother now - the weather wasn't her fault - but Loreda couldn't help herself. She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant shew as mad at her mom most of all.

In her hurt, she did what she'd always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return.