Quotes About Family

It helps enormously to have had a loving mother. Mothers can give their daughters permission to love their fathers. Mothers can help their daughters feel good about becoming mothers. Mothers can help daughters learn the value of openness and female friendship, especially when times are bad

One only has to watch aging siblings scrap over the worthless pots and pans and scuffed furniture of a deceased parent's estate- like toddlers over toys- to see how desperate is the need to wrest some last, pathetic, tangible measure of their parent's devotion.

The psychological absence of fathers can be nearly as devastating as physical absence. When fathers are alive but not a predictable presence actively participating in their daughter's lives the relationship becomes a permanent "maybe.

A girl's sense of her womanly self depends only in part on how closely she has followed her mother's example in attire and actions, or how much she loves or hates or respects her. It is from both parents that a girl gains her basic identity.

At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers' parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.

Parental neglect even in intact families, can have a shattering effect on how daughters- even those with loving mothers- feel about men.

Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.

I got a telegraph from my mother who said that my step-father had had a heart attack, come home and earn a living. So I went back to England and the only thing I knew to earn any cash was through hairdressing.

That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he'd feel the exact same thing.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

More than all those people who starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.

My parents did not grant me so much as an allowance. When I had asked for one in the fourth grade, my father had frowned and said, "Let me think it over." The next night he handed me an itemized list of expenses that included my birth, feeding, education, and clothing, the sum total being $24,376. "This doesn't include emotional aggravation, compound interest, or future expenses," my father said. "Now when can you start paying me an allowance?

In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.

Telling these kinds of stories, or learning to read, see and hear family stories as war stories, is an important way to treat the disorder of our military-industrial complex. For rather than being disturbed by the idea that war is hell, this complex thrives on it.

More than all those people starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me.

Like the homeless, refugees are living embodiments of a disturbing possibility: that human privileges are quite fragile, that one's home, family, and nation are one catastrophe away from being destroyed.

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.

A Christian Family is God's Advertisement of His Kingdom to the World !

Maybe this was why people had kids, so that when you could no longer travel with your parents, your children made all train trips new again.

Don't worry. I won't forgive you –' Bashir Ali blanched '– because there's nothing to forgive. We are both trapped, you on that side of the door and me on this. Do what they tell you to do, get it over with and go home to your children. Nothing will happen to you. Not now and not later. I give you my word.' There was a pause. 'The word of Ganesh Gaitonde.' By

And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.' Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it.

How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof, Or fares, or one thing or another, How we had days to spend under our parents' roof; Myself, my sister, and my brother. All five of us will die; to reckon from the past This flesh and blood is unforgiving. What's hard is that just one of us will be the last To bear it all and go on living.

Oh, no said her mother sadly. You know nothing of the pettiness of women. When brothers agree to split a joint family they sometimes divide lakhs of rupees worth of property in a few minutes. But the tussle of their wives over the pots and pans in the common kitchen--that nearly causes bloodshed.