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Quotes About Family

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.
~ James Baldwin
We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.
~ James Baldwin
He had been been patting his handkerchief between his palms; now he opened his handkerchief and reached out and wiped my forehead. You're all I've got, he said then, with a shy, pained grin. Be careful. Daddy, I said. And began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop. And my father's face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely helplessly young ... Don't cry, he said, don't cry.
~ James Baldwin
I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed. I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.
~ James Baldwin
We're going to sit down somewhere until this rush hour's over. You and me, we've got to talk anyway, before we talk to Mama and Daddy. They don't know yet. I haven't talked to them yet." And I realize how much Ernestine loves me, at the same time that I remember that she is, after all, only four years older than I.
~ James Baldwin
I don't know, I'm just my mother's son. Sometimes that's all that makes the difference between us and them.
~ James Baldwin
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. I
~ James Baldwin
me. 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.
~ James Baldwin
The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down
~ James Baldwin
Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together—whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.
~ James Baldwin
I remembered my mother's insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.
~ James Baldwin
How strange and beautiful—it must be one of the few real reasons for remaining alive, of desiring to—to dance with your daughter, your son, and your wife; touching, really digging it, laughing, and keeping the beat, free
~ James Baldwin
if we don't spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.
~ James C. Collins
quando in una famiglia c'erano più lavoratori che membri non lavoratori, la famiglia riduceva lo sforzo lavorativo complessivo una volta assicurata la produzione sufficiente.
~ James C. Scott
Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way. Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people's hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim.
~ James Carlos Blake
Why is it there is always such violence between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law? Doesn't daughter-in-law, in time, become mother-in-law? Why does she then always treat her own daughter-in-law to a lashing tongue and make her life a misery, and why does that girl do the same in her turn? Doesn't anyone learn?
~ James Clavell
kith or kin lust for power as others do.
~ James Clavell
One member of this family, however, was a divine child, a future avatar, and so of great consequence to the ensuing transformation of the world. The others—his stepfather Joseph, his mother Mary, and midwife Salome—were his chosen protectors.
~ James Cowan
Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact.
~ James Ellroy
Achtung, motherfuckers. And good afternoon. I'm James Ellroy; the death dog with the hog log, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I am the author of eighteen books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. They are books for the whole fucking family, if the name of your family is the Manson family.
~ James Ellroy
I got an emergency leave. I visited my dad on his deathbed. His last words to me: "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.
~ James Ellroy
green leather chairs arranged around low tables and settees; huge stone fireplace; small Oriental throw rugs, multicolored, placed together at different angles, so that just the right amount of oak floor bordered them. The walls were cherrywood, and featured framed sepias of the family and their ancestors.
~ James Ellroy
John Purvis joined his mother and lawyer on the Phil Donahue show.
~ James Ellroy