Quotes About Family

My mother sewed my name into all my underwear. But, really, it was another boy's name I was ready to sew into my heart.

Hang out? his mother said. Sweetheart, laundry hangs out.

Sisters dress up to rehearse for what will really happen to them. But brothers, Elijah realizes, are never rehearsing that way. They rehearse their own illusions, until reality takes a turn and they are asked to rehearse for other things. You go to school. You graduate. You sell snack cakes. You hang up your cape and put on a suit.

I tried to put myself in his place, and realized we looked exactly like what we were: a family. These strangely tied together individuals trying desperately to keep both ourselves and one another happy. Succeeding, and failing, and succeeding.

It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being. It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.

No existe nada más doloroso que contemplar a alguien cuando pierde la confianza en ti. En especial, si se trata de tu madre.

If anything goes wrong at home, you can't tell anyone outside of home. Pity is worse than pain, embarrassment is worse than help. If people treat you like shit, you still have to stay loyal to them. You still have to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe you are, in fact, shit and deserve to be treated the way they treat you.

I can see how siblings could be helpful in life—someone to share family secrets with, someone of your own generation who knows if your memories are right or not, someone who sees you at eight and eighteen and forty-eight all at once, and doesn't mind.

His mother's expression softens. "Do you need anything?" she asks. For a moment, Craig's heart feels entirely porous. Not because his mother has asked such a monumental question, but because it's such an ordinary one. This is the mother he knows. Do you need anything? As if she were running to Walgreens or the grocery store. As if nothing has changed.

It is my father who looks diminished now. As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we're really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.

is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.

There is the distance of miles, and the distance of brothers, to overcome. He can feel the world coming between them again. But the world is so much smaller than it used to be.

My mother once told me that you really know someone when you know their parents.

He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says.

Jennifer Lynch: My father deeply loved both of his parents, but he also despised all that goodness, the white picket fence and all that. He has a romantic idea of that stuff, but he also hated it because he wanted to smoke cigarettes and live the art life, and they went to church and everything was perfect and quiet and good. It made him a little nutty.

Children strengthen marital bonds, reducing the probability of divorce, by creating a powerful commonality of genetic interest between a man and a woman.

Murders by acquaintances, friends, and family are much more common than murders by strangers.

Cain wonders what his father had made of him at this age. The idea is startling, that he and his father might have such things in common as pleasures and annoyances of parenthood. Seldom has he let himself consider the world through his father's eyes.

How could he ever scorn Henoch? It's normal enough to grow a bit impatient with the boy from time to time. Or so he hopes. But to banish Henoch from sight, the way his own father banished him --- the very idea causes his insides to clench up. He could never do such a thing.

Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both. In

The millennia-long evolution of the human family as a means of dealing with the environment was discarded by my generation of fantasists, in favor of a concept not only artificial, but inchoate: "freedom"—the pursuit of which has led to misery.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.

Ese material se te ocurre cuando estás borracho? Preguntó un primo de Faulkner.

He doesn't see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.