Quotes About Family

Five years, a year, even six months earlier, Lydia would have found sympathy in her brother's eyes. I know. I know. Confirmation and consolation in a single blink. This time Nath, immersed in a library book, did not notice Lydia's clenched fingers, the sudden red that rimmed her eyes. Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.

She knew what her parents had longed for, without them saying a word, and she had wanted them happy.

how hard it would be to inherit their parents' dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.

She glanced at her brothers, at her mother, still in her bathrobe on their tree lawn, and thought, They have literally nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Do you want me to leave?' Lexie shook her head. 'Stay,' she said. 'It's fine. I'm fine. Just stay.' After a moment, Izzy slid a square piece of paper across the table, and Lexie took it and began to follow her sister's lead: folding over, back, to the center, out, until at last she took hold of the corners and pulled and a crane bloomed like a pale flower in her hands.

At bedtime, Nath and Lydia brushed their teeth sociably at the sink, taking turns to spit, saying goodnight as if it were any other night. It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn't find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pushed her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.

Everything that loomed so large close up—school, their parents, their lives—all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags.

Yet after seven years at Harvard—four as an undergrad, three and counting as a graduate student—nothing had changed. Without realizing why, he studied the most quintessentially American subject he could find—cowboys—but he never spoke of his parents, or his family. He still had few acquaintances and no friends. He still found himself shifting in his seat, as if at any moment someone might notice him and ask him to leave.

When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

glowering Izzy in the backseat. No one

A part of her wanted to stay home, to simply be with her children, but her mother had always scorned woman who didn't work. "Wasting their potential," she had sniffed. "You've got a good brain, Elena. You're not going to sit at home and knit, are you?" A modern woman, she always implied, was capable - nay, required - to have it all.

remembered then that Lexie, thank god, had stayed over at Serena Wong's house last night. She wondered where Izzy had gotten to. She wondered where her sons were, and how she would find them to tell them what had happened.

When, a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

Every bedroom was empty except for the smell of gasoline and a small crackling fire set directly in the middle of each bed, as if a demented Girl Scout had been camping there. By the time she checked the living room, the family room, the rec room, and the kitchen, the smoke had begun to spread, and she ran outside at last to hear the sirens, alerted by their home security system, already approaching.

More than once she'd seen Pearl lean over carelessly to fix Moody's collar; just the other day, she'd seen Moody reach out to pluck a wayward leaf from Pearl's hair with such tenderness that she could call it nothing other than love.

higher standard than her other children, to demand more from her, yet at the same time to overlook her successes in favor of her faults.

Mom," she said. "Dad. It's not what you think.

All her life she had heard her mother's heart Drumming one beat: doctor, doctor, doctor. She wanted this so much, Lydia knew, that she no longer needed to say it. It was always there. Lydia could not imagine another future, another life. It was like trying to imagine a world where the sun went around the moon, or where there was no such thing as air.

This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away.

Son, it's time to go home

Vše zas a znova kon?ilo u jedné a téže otázky: Co d?lá n?koho matkou? Výhradn? biologie, nebo je to láska?)

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image.

Pearl glanced over her shoulder, in the universal reaction of all teenagers confronted by their parents in a public place