Quotes About Family

When does that moment come, Emma wondered, when mothers stop kissing their children, and young men start kissing their mothers?

I do have a built-in advantage,' said Giles. 'I am my father's son.

Think twice before you employ members of your own family and never assume that anyone will pay their debts.

Well done, Anne,' she said, as if her daughter-in-law had won a minor rosette at a regatta. 'All of us are so very proud of you.

when mothers stop kissing their children, and young men start kissing their mothers?

his daughter's success

How a family reacts to a child's behavior and how a child is disciplined also play a big role in the development of defiant behaviors. The

America cut back on "welfare" from the 1970s onward. Family income support fell from 0.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to under 0.2 percent in 2010.16 Welfare still looms large in the public's imagination, but it plays little role in the budget and the deficit. It's been a long time since America was generous to its poor families with children! The

he has trouble separating from his family for even short periods of time. He cannot grow up and leave home. He has a fused self.

The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

that since Cecilia's suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.

Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.

Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it's my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t 's and b 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x .