Quotes About Family

Perhaps I worried that if I didn't wander off, my family would get on my nerves, or—far more likely—I would get on theirs, and that our week together wouldn't be as ideal as I'd told myself it would be.

in Japan, if you commit suicide by throwing yourself in front of a train, your family gets fined the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars for all the inconvenience you caused. Of course, if your family was the whole reason you were killing yourself, I suppose it would just be an added incentive.

David Sedaris

You'd think my mother could have seen the difference between the sunny, likable her and the dark one who'd call late at night. I could hear the ice cubes in her glass rushing forth whenever she took a sip. In my youth, when she'd join my father for a drink after work—"Just one, I have to get dinner on the table"—that was a happy sound. Now it was like a trigger being cocked.

She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncallused hands.

I wouldn't know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum but because I was gay.

Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered.

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs.

Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family's asshole.

You kids might think you're close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you're left to divide up our property.

Even sober, she'd rail against that: all the junk my father dragged home and left in the yard or the basement—old newspapers and magazines, toaster ovens picked out of the trash, hoses, sheets of plywood—all of it "perfectly good," all of it just what he needed.

Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn't your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet?

Hey," he said, "that's where we used to go when we were a family.

Your trash. You're trash. Your family's trash.

Dad doesn't pay attention when you talk to him, so Paul's taken to throwing the term IRS into his sentences. Then it's suddenly: "Hold on a second, what did you say?

There's an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: "Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape." Is there a richer or more complex story than that?

I told myself that if I looked at my brother differently, it was because of the suit, nto the weight. He was a grown man now. He was going to get married, and therefore, he was a changed person. He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. This shit's like making love in a canoe. Excuse me? It's fucking near water. Then again, I thought, maybe it is just the weight.

I told myself that if I looked at my brother differently, it was because of the suit, not the weight. He was a grown man now. He was going to get married, and therefore, he was a changed person. He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. This shit's like making love in a canoe. Excuse me? It's fucking near water. Then again, I thought, maybe it is just the weight.

When we went to the beach as children, on or about the fourth day, our father would say, Wouldn't it be nice to buy a cottage down here? We'd get our hopes up and then he would bring practical concerns into it... But still, we wanted one desperately. I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and then it would be everyone's. As long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it.

I don't know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up.

Do you think it was my fault that she drank?" my father asked not long ago. It's the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It's almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

even then that without them, I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy—and

There's an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: "Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

A few hours laterDad called again. The vet had put his Great Dane, Sophie, on antibiotics, and, figuring it was all basically the same thing, he had started taking them. I'm just not sure of the dose, he said. Lisa then called me. Can you believe this? I thought she was upset that her father was taking pills meant for a dog, and then I remembered who I was talking to. I mean, how is Sophie supposed to get better when Dad is taking all her medicine? I just don't think that's right.