Quotes About Family

the more committed a family becomes to a given project, the more vulnerable it also becomes.

A major part of the explanation is that the missionary father has a wife who is also a missionary, just as well educated as he is. The children cannot escape being intelligent, and because the family is so poor, the children have to be clever about money. What a combination

From the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons.

I'm going to repeat this: I buy experiences and not things. I don't like to buy my kids' gifts. But I'll take them places and won't hold back. They will lose and forget the "things" in the long run. But they will never forget the experiences.

The only things that really matter in this world are the relationships you have with the people you love, and the meaningful things that you do

You decide whom you say NO to. You are entitled to choose your tribe, regardless of what society imposes on you. You decide who in your life drains you of energy, and then purge them so you can soar. This does not mean you become a hermit; it means you choose your family, your friends, your colleagues, your tribe, your life.

Whose little boy are you?

It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.

When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. "I'm going, Ma," she said. "I got to go.

And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes.

despair, whether or not can be taken home and placed in the family table, must always be respected. Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble.

Yes, Mama. I'm going to try to love the Lord." At this there sprang into his mother's face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad—as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveler in perpetual danger. Was it he, the traveler? or herself? or was she thinking of the cross of Jesus?

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.

EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late

Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.

He didn't like his sisters and I didn't have any brothers. And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.

It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

I was there, then, for the , in a way that hadn't nothing to do with me. I was there, then, for them, like Fonny was present, like my baby, just beginning now, out of a long, long sleep, to turn, to listen, to awaken, somewhere beneath my heart.

But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.