Quotes About Family

When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle.

A little while after we'd moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn't do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure.

I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?

We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Claus myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, Dad said, you'll still have your stars.

Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I'd be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom's, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some

You mean you own land worth a million dollars?" I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars?

We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, Dad said, you'll still have your stars.

we fought a lot in welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; Maybe it was because life there was hard and it made the people hard...maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids.

We raised our glasses. I could almost hear Dad chuckling at Mom's comment in the way he always did when he was truly enjoying something. It had grown dark outside. A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order.

Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius," he said. "You take after your old man.

I'd never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own.

What I wanted to say was that I knew Eric would never try to steal my paycheck or throw me out the window, that I'd always been terrified I'd fall for a hard-drinking, hellraising, charismatic scoundrel like you, Dad, but I'd wound up with a man who was exactly the opposite.

Mom said we should all live near the Pacific Ocean at least once in our lives, so we kept going all the way to San Francisco.

She was keeping it, she explained, to replace the wedding ring her mother had given her, the Dad had pawned shortly after they got married. 'But Mom,' I said, 'that ring could get us a lot of food.' 'That's true,' Mom said, 'but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food.

For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn't do any good

If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about

woman grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me over the chain. "It's all right," I told her. "My dad does stuff like this all the time." "He should be arrested!" she shouted. "Okay, kids

She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of hers was reading.

If things don't work out, you can always come home, he said. I'll be here for you. You know that, don't you? I know. I knew that in his way, he would be. I also knew I'd never be coming back.

Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder and passed

I know what it's like to be beholden to kin, to be dependent on their kindness, all the while knowing they can cut you off with a snap of the fingers.

months pregnant. Dad, who had fixed

He groped me! And he's wanking off!' Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. 'Poor Stanley,' she said. 'He's so lonely.

Any little girl whose mama disappears will always have a hole in her heart that nothing will ever completely fill.