Quotes About Family

Louisiana is not a state; it's an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That's not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.

A therapist once told me that we're born alone and we die alone. It's not true. We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup.

As a young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of your youth, did you ever have a day when you knew that for the rest of your life, you would be grateful that your father was your father and your mother was your mother, no matter how flawed they might be?

How do you live with it, family and friends ask. The answer is I don't. When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound. I feel I'm in a house of mirrors, and I want to break every one of them.

James Lee Burke

What kind of trees are those? I asked. Heartwood, my father said. They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you.

I will not accept my daughter's death. I will find a way to pull her back through the veil or untether myself and lie down in the bottom of a boat that has no oars and float down the Columbia and into the Pacific, where she will be waiting for me somewhere beyond the sun.

If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems.

Without really trying to or meaning to, Mal had become the head of a family, and it was a family that took the fun out of dysfunctional.

His father placed his elbows on the table and leaned toward him. "We need to know if you are simply ordinary or larger than life." To the best of his ability, he mulled over the notion of being larger than life. "Did you have to go there when you were young?" His father nodded. "Were you afraid?" His father sat back into his tall, brocaded armchair, as if in recall. "In the beginning I was. Until I learned to overcome fear.

When Mildred went to bed her stomach hurt from laughter, her heart ached from happiness. Then she remembered that while Veda had kissed her, that first moment when she had entered the house, she still hadn't kissed Veda. She tiptoed into the room she had hoped Veda would occupy, knelt beside the bed as she had knelt so many times in Glendale, took the lovely creature in her arms and kissed her, hard, on the mouth.

Veda stalked out, and Mildred grimly arranged the tray, wondering why Veda could put her so easily on the defensive, and hurt her so.

It was a long time before Mildred could bring herself to send Veda to bed. She wanted to keep her there, to warm herself in this sunny, carefree friendliness that had never been there before. When the time finally came, she took Veda in herself, and helped her undress, and put her in bed, and held her tight for a moment, still ecstatic at the miracle that had come to pass.

Are you insinuating that my daughter is a snake?" "No—is a coloratura soprano, is much worse. A little snake, love mamma, do what papa tells, maybe, but a coloratura soprano, love nobody but own goddam self. Is son-bitch-bast', worse than all a snake in a world. Madame, you leave dees girl alone.

Don't wash family linen in public, or with anyone except family.

When she got home, Bert came out to meet her, and took her into the den, where Letty was trying to quiet Veda. Letty went back to the kitchen, and Veda broke into loud sobs. Over and over, she kept saying: "I owed her a nickel! Oh, Mother, I cheated her out of it, and I meant to pay it back, but—I owed her a nickel!

I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride

The plain truth is that you'd have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God. I

My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control.

My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my enemies.

To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman's physical problem.

I didn't make head nor tails of what he was saying, for I was to learn that Old John Brown could work the Lord into just about any aspect of his comings and goings in life, including using the privy. That's one reason I weren't a believer, having been raised by my Pa, who was a believer and a lunatic, and them things seemed to run together.

Family love: It is firm footing, something to cling to in a frightened world that seems to spin out of control with war, turmoil, terrorism, and uncertainty. It is our highest calling and our greatest nobility.

They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their "I was raised with nuthin' and went to Harvard anyway" experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream.