Quotes About Family

Blood family, that's something we get dealt. Sometimes we get a bad hand. Not much way around it. You just have to grow up and get more family. The kind you get to pick out yourself.

Well, you know how it is. We either grow up to be our mother or we make a solemn vow to the universe to be her polar opposite. Doesn't work every minute of every day, though.

I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one. Then I said, "I think it's because my mother loves me so much." He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know?

Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.

A tightening in her chest almost stopped her. It was a foreign feeling, to be so afraid of words addressed to her own son. And, in another very real way, familiar. She had stood at this threshold many times, and each time she had let that clench of fear stop her.

Now, there are silences, and there are silences, especially in the house where we grew up. If we'd ever talked about the silences out loud, I'm sure we'd have had a hundred different words to identify them like the Eskimos do with snow.

multiple kids. They always need something, but everything is always happening at once. You know they need you, but there's never much time to follow through. And yet I was the one who'd wanted the big family. The bustling household. Because I'd been an only child, raised by parents who barely spoke, either to each other or to me. So I loved the commotion.

We shouldn't have stayed so long." "Water under the bridge, Buddy Boy." Buddy wondered why his father would bring up anything as scary as the river flowing under the railroad bridge. Especially at a time like this.

I was born with the caul. According to Grandma Ginsberg, this signified great things. But it proved a disappointment. Yes, I was the smartest child in all of my classes, the most morbidly mature that any of my teachers had seen, save my sister DeeDee. Yes, I was spiritually advanced, but in my family this was nothing special.

No," he said. "Go." He snapped the last snap of Maya's onesie and lifted her by her underarms, setting her on her freshly dry butt in her crib. Then he took me by both shoulders. "I'll take tomorrow off work. I'll call it in as a family emergency. I'll put the baby's car seat in my car, and Maya and I will drive out to Bakersfield and pick up your mom.

mean. The biggest regret of his life has been having no last name, no pictures of Pearl, and no way of knowing who his father was. Oh, by the way . . .

How would you feel if somebody blamed you for something your mother did?

It's like life has given you this huge challenge to make sure that what was running in your family stops with you and doesn't go on any more than it has.

That was the problem with my mother. I could never fully get her voice out of my head.

The 'J' is for 'Jackie,' " he said. "But why don't you just call her 'Mom'?" "Oh. So I don't get her mixed up with my other mom. P-Mom. The 'P' is for 'Paula.

The thing I'll always remember best about that time is not how quickly our family fell apart. The memorable bit was when I first looked back at how we'd convinced ourselves we'd ever been together in the first place.

There comes an age when you answer a call that has nothing to do with the family that raised you. You grow up over their heads, beyond their reach. They'll hate you for it, but this is the natural order of things.

My older relatives grabbed me and latched onto me, and I felt like they wanted something from me. Their love felt like a demand. Then I let go and they pinched my cheeks and kissed them, and it only made me feel drained, like I had all the love and they only wanted to refill their tanks by taking some of mine.

It suddenly occurs to me that happy families probably don't repeatedly say out loud how happy they are. They probably think it goes without saying. They probably figure they all already know.

Don't ever say that to me again. It was not nothing. You did an incredible thing for your father. And you always have that. It's part of who you are now. You stepped up to it, and now you're up on a higher level than you were before. You gave the man a gift. The fact that he doesn't know how to value it doesn't mean it wasn't a great gift. It just means he has lousy taste in presents.

I trotted down all three flights of stairs feeling weirdly happy. My sister was back. And at least I had one sort-of friend. You have to have gotten down pretty low before something as small as that starts to look like happy to you.

We either grow up to be our mother or we make a solemn vow to the universe to be her polar opposite. Doesn't work every minute of every day, though.

I don't read you." I guess I didn't really expect him to. Because I'd never told him the beginning of the conversation. I hoped that didn't mean I was getting to be more like my mom.

She stopped herself. He wasn't a boy. A time comes in the life of a mother and son when that kind of mothering crosses the line into critical behavior. At age thirty he could eat and talk in any way he saw fit.