Quotes About Family

My hands are clammy. It's a terrible kind of anticipation, not knowing what we're walking into. The last time I felt this way I was in the waiting rooms at Ellis Island. We were tired, and Mam wasn't well, and we didn't know where we were going or what kind of life we would have. But now I can see all I took for granted: I had a family. I believed that whatever happened, we'd be together. A policeman blows a whistle

A man whose mother won't let him lift a finger is ruined for a wife." The

This isn't bickering. This is classic mother-daughter communications. I've been reading up on it.

Unwrapping the leftover currant bread at the Grotes' that evening, I tell them about my party. Mr. Grote snorts. "How ridiculous, celebrating a birth date. I don't even know the day I was born, and I sure can't remember any of theirs," he says, swinging his hand toward his kids. "But let's have that cake.

In Bangor, she'd had no incentive to do homework—her foster parents were partiers, and she'd come home from school to find a house full of drunks. In Spruce Harbor, there aren't so many distractions. Dina and Ralph don't drink or smoke, and they're strict. Jack has a beer now and then, but that's about it. And Molly discovered that she actually likes to study.

At breakfast—lumpy oats with no sugar—when I ask how to get to school and what time I'm expected to be there, Mrs. Byrne looks at her husband and then back at me. She pulls her dark paisley scarf tight around her shoulders. "Dorothy, Mr. Byrne and I feel that you are not ready for school.

SEVERAL MINUTES LATER, MR. BYRNE PULLS INTO THE DRIVEWAY of a modest beige stucco house with brown trim. As soon as he turns off the car, Mrs. Byrne looks back at me and says, "We've decided on Dorothy.

Riddled his body with bullets"—my da talked like that. Mam was always shushing him, but he waved her off. "It's important they know this," he said. "It's their history! We might be over here now, but by God, our people are over there.

You could be my daughter, you know," Mr. Byrne tells me. "Your name—Dorothy . . . we always said we'd give to our own child someday, but alas it didn't come to pass. And here you are, red hair and all.

other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. "Not so fast, Molly Molasses," he'd say. "Easy. Otherwise the eggs'll go splat.

When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father's impotent rage and my mother's infinite capacity for forgiveness.

Maisie sensed it first. She wouldn't stop crying. Since she was a month old, when our mother got sick,

as a week. She's been spanked with a spatula, slapped across

only link we had to our future was a name scrawled on a piece of paper my father tucked in his shirt pocket as we boarded the ship: a man who had emigrated ten years earlier and now, according to his Kinvara relatives, owned a respectable dining establishment in New York City.

It was worse for Mam, who discovered on the boat she was again with child and could hardly keep any food down. But even with all of this, as I stood on the lower deck outside our dark, cramped rooms in steerage, watching the oily water churn beneath the Agnes Pauline, I felt my spirits lift. Surely, I thought, we would find a place for ourselves in America.

father's drinking—did I mention that?

The night of the fire, the night they took me in, I could hear Mrs. Schatzman in her bedroom, fretting with her husband about what to do with me. "I didn't ask for this," she hissed, the words as distinct to my ears as if she'd been in the same room. "Those Irish! Too many children in too small a space. The only surprise is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more.

Every person you've ever cared about, and every place you've ever loved, is one of these shells. You're the thread that ties them together," she'd said, touching Mathinna's cheek. "You carry the people and places you cherish with you. Remember that and you will never be lonely,

Feeding Carmine bread soaked in milk reminds me of the Irish dish called champ I often made for Maisie and the boys—a mash of potatoes, milk, green onions (on the rare occasion when we had them), and salt. On the nights when we went to bed hungry, all of us dreamed of that champ.

Perhaps Anita Loos had been right when she wrote that family life was only fit for those who could stand it.

The lawyer asked us to sit down. He was holding a copy of the will in his hands. I sat nearest him. He flipped several pages over and then handed me the copy, with only the last page showing. There at the top of the final page of the will was one short paragraph which read: "It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher or my daughter Christina for reasons which are well known to them.

Mother took the big saw from me and walked over to the orange tree which stood at one end of the totally mutilated rose garden. It was a mature tree standing maybe eight feet tall, producing lots of oranges. It was covered with fruit. The nurse, the cook, and I stood at a kind of breathless attention watching her as she began to saw the trunk of the orange tree! Finally we heard a cracking, splintering sound and the orange tree toppled over into the stubby remains of the rose garden.

Everyone thinks you're so strong and self-confident, but inside you're a frightened child, waiting to suffer betrayal again from those who should love you most.

I'm an ambassador for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and one of the children, his wish was to go to the Emmys, so he's going to be my date, along with my husband, and my dad and his girlfriend. So we're going to have a really fun night and it's going to be really exciting. I'm really excited for him to experience that.