Quotes About Family

When my mother felt my father take her hand into his—they were not clapping—she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.

William was quite the hand at Couperin's Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel's Messiah. As for the seduced parishioner, the military man's young wife, Jack's mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn't been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.

No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?

Am I not here, for I am your mother?

I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room—what had been Atkins's "study," as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.

Adolescence. Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. "Yes," Lupe said, "but we can't ever get married.

He's from Finland," Alice explained. "That means your father has gone to Helsinki, Jack.

Goodness gracious!" my grandmother said. "Why didn't you begin with Harvard?" "It's not important to him," my mother said. But Harvard '45 was important enough to my grandmother to calm her troubled hands; they left her brooch alone, and returned to rest in her lap.

Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one's vision what correct behavior is.

Why do we need them if we hate them?" the daughter tiredly asked. "We hate them because we need them," the mother answered, her speech slurred.

In my arms, which I realized had grown very strong, I held the former Big Ten star, who was as heavy and meaningful, to me, as our family bear, and I stared into the short distance that separated us from Sorrow.

It's a good job to lose!" Jack called after them, but they kept walking. He was so bad as Melody, even Wild Bill Vanvleck would have made him repeat the line. The point was—he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character. He had a sister, and he loved her; she'd said she loved him, too. Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns—the real Jack Burns at last.

heard all the grown-ups kiss Franny good night and I thought: Families must be like this—gore one minute, forgiveness the next.

As in many things, my mother could be extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive.

The girl looked too frightened to speak. Then she said: "I know you have to give my mother the flag—at the funeral. I know what my mother's gonna do—when you give her the flag. She said she's gonna spit on you," the pregnant sister told Owen. "And I know her—she will!" the girl said. "She'll spit in your face!" "IT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES," Owen said.

Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls—as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. "Jesus God!" he would holler. "You're the wrong number!" Thus, in this small way, did my Father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.

One day, Jenny Fields thought, she would like to have a baby – just one.

THE summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born—we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. My father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their "union," as Frank always called it, hadn't taken place when Father bought the bear.

And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith—his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his mean-spirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother—that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off.

To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us—it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating.

Homer Wells cried because he'd never known how nice a father's kisses could be, and he cried because he doubted that Wilbur Larch would ever do it again-or would have done it, if he'd thought Homer was awake.

beauty, and Owen possessed a

Jack's mother was particularly miserable when she discovered that she wasn't the only choirgirl who'd fallen in love with Jack's father, but she was the only one who was pregnant.