Quotes About Family

War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm

If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this.

His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one. Good. You lived, his mother replied, and his father said, Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.

I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I'M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE'S WHAT I'LL DO FOR YOU. I'LL GIVE YOU THE BAPTISM. THAT'S ALL I CAN DO FOR YOU.

Mamma, don't you see -- you shouldn't hit me. He shouldn't hit me. You shouldn't hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God . . . .

Pensando na morte de seu irmão - e no ataque mortal do pai - me peguei comparando aquele sorriso seu com um curativo sobre uma ferida. (p.75)

Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters.

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.

Ordinarily my mother drew no strength from scorn

Why doesn't she call the cops and get me shipped off to children's prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? "Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother." You'd think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.

Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren.

she was fifty-five and seared with hot flashes, and her daughter's was now the female form exuding the magnetic currents.

Sheila would know. She knew it all. Yes, she'd have an answer to that one too. . . . She'd come so far, Sheila had said, she'd gotten so much stronger I thought that she could make it on her own. She's a strong girl, Seymour. She's a crazy girl. She's crazy! She's troubled. And the father plays no role with the troubled daughter? I'm sure he played plenty of a role. I just thought something terrible had happened at home.

Dostoevsky is also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.

It is said a man doesn't get old while his mother lives. I think it's true. You are always a child in her eyes. It is irritating in the extreme. But you know, when they have gone, you'd give the earth just to hear them treating you like a child once more.

There are times, Sember, when I could believe your mother had a secret lover. Looking at you makes me wonder if it was one of my goats.

What do all men seek? I want to be happy. I would like a wife and sons one day. But I want them to grow in a land where there is hope for the future, where men do not take to the road. If that is a hopeless dream - and maybe it is - then I will sire no sons. I will wander, and play my harp, and weave my magick until the end.

Yes, it would have been good, he thought, to spend quiet years with his family, waiting for his diseased heart to fail as he sat in his chair staring at the mountains. But this was better. This was life! Not the killing and the terrified screams of dying men suddenly facing the awesome spectre of their own mortality. No, but to face his fears as a man, to stand at the brink of the abyss and refuse to be cowed or beaten down.

A man needs many things in his life to make it bearable. A good woman. Sons and daughters. Comradeship. Warmth. Food and shelter. But above all these things, he needs to be able to know that he is a man.

No, but if you will forgive me, let me say this: all children are creatures of joy, and all people are capable of love. You feel you lost everything, but there was a time before your joy when your children did not exist and your wife was unknown to you. Could it not be that there is a woman somewhere who will fill your life with love, and bear you children to bring you joy?

Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on—otherwise he is useless. "For most men that purpose revolves around marriage and children