Quotes About Family

Every kid had heard of Fun Town, been there or envied someone who had. In the third cut on side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever

Harriet thought they should wake the boy. "Let him sleep," Evelyn said, and that was the last she heard from them. If her daughter had ever been suited for motherhood, she never demonstrated it. The look on her face when little Elwood suckled on her breast—her joyless, empty eyes seeing through the walls of the house and into pure nothing—chilled Harriet to the bone whenever she remembered it.

It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later she said yes. This time it was her mother talking.

In Cora's shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family's plot.

Stubborn breaks when it don't bend, and his family had spent too much time with the kindly white folks in the north. Kindly in that they didn't see fit to kill you fast. One thing about the south, it was not patient when it came to killing negroes. In

You're supposed to pass on something useful to your children.

As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn't think of where else he'd rather be.

We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another.

Some days Carney felt the need to press his cousin on a lie until it broke and some days his love was such that the slightest quiver of mistrust made him ashamed.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don't begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.

He was the son of his son--he was here, he was left behind.

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn't interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them said good night, while the other waited.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van.People here call it the whispering coach. The relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. - We now have pure communism. But communism murders more honestly.

We are completely isolated. We have heard nothing from Annemarie Kohler, nothing from Johannes Kohler for weeks.......A frightening silence.

She'd had to endure the humiliation of my father's infidelity for so long

father nodded. "Well, getting to know each other means getting to know everything. Family structure, how one was raised—those are important factors.

He'd been our center, the glue that held us together and gave us purpose.

My sister the booty police.

At forty-three, I bought my first house. I'd wanted one like crazy. A house meant family, a happy childhood for my litttle girl and for the little girl self inside me. . . . I was soon overwhelmed by the upkeep and overcome by the yardwork. . . . In the bright light of closing, it was obvious: it was never a house I wanted; it was what a house symbolized to me. (254)