Quotes About Family

As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I'm not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.

Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery — our mere existence is punishment enough.

And I know, with the newfuond clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstances

Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn't know until we left how much we took those things for granted.

Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They're passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

I get the sense that my abandonment, and the circumstances that brought me to them, matter little to them, compared to the need I might fill in their lives. - (Niamh/Dorothy)

You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.

Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother's favorite gospel hymn ... Mary's lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don't know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something.

I'm one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she'd make me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.

When you live on a farm, everyone is uncomfortable much of the time. Too cold, too warm, dirty, bone tired, banged up, injured by a tool or hot grate - too preoccupied to worry much about each other

Christina Baker Kline

The child you select is yours for free," he adds, "on a ninety-day trial. At which point, if you so choose, you may send him back.

It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables.

As I watch her pine casket descend...I try to envision the reunion of a frail eighty year old woman with her decades younger husband and their three sons and am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go

Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before. Who are you, Christina Olson? he asked me once. Nobody had ever asked me that. I had to think about it for a while. If

Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables. "I suppose this is why people have children, isn't it?" she muses. "So somebody will care about the stuff they leave behind.

When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What's left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew. Mother

Over the years, certain stories in the history of family take hold. They're passes from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely form the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

She offers me a bull's-eye sweet, which she's stashed in her apron pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I'll never forget. On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes to sing to an old Irish tune: Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes. Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise.

I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must've been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—"cured," he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway. Mr. Grote doesn't

Well," she says, "I'm a Penobscot Indian on my father's side. When I was young, we lived on a reservation near Old Town." "Ah. Hence the black hair and tribal makeup." Molly is startled. She's never thought to make that connection—is it true?

It was during this period that she would wake in the night and get out of bed to go to her parents' room, only to realize, standing in the hall, that she had no parents.

Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story by Andrea Warren; Children of the Orphan Trains, 1854–1929 by Holly Littlefield; and Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (which