Quotes About Family

When the crops were under cover on the Wayne farm near Pittsford in Vermont, when the winter wood was cut and the first light snow lay on the ground, Joseph Wayne went to the wing-back chair by the fireplace late one afternoon and stood before his father.

You're jest a-teasin' yourself up to cry. I don' know what's come at you. Our folks ain't never did that. They took what come to 'em dry-eyed.

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

Cal considered. "What did my father do to make her leave?" "He loved her with his whole mind and body. He gave her everything he could imagine.

It's a thing to see when a boy comes home. It's a thing to see.

Grandpa didn't die tonight. He died the minute you took 'im off the place [...] He was that place, an' he knowed it.

The family met at the most important place, near the truck. The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle.

He had good children and he raised them fine. All doing well -maybe except Joe...they're talking about sending him to college, but all the rest are fine.

Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.

All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas Valley, not poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. Samuel was well pleased with the fruit of his loins.

I come from a whole goddam family of inventors, said Will. We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries.

They have one quilt and a piece of canvas for bedding. The sleeping arrangement is clever. Mother and father lie down together and two children lie between them. Then heading the other way, the other two children lie, the littler ones. If the mother and father sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for the legs of the children.

I seen her beat the hell out of a tin peddler with a live chicken one time 'cause he give her a argument. She had the chicken in one han', an' the ax in the other, about to cut its head off. She aimed to go for that peddler with the ax, but she forgot which hand was which, an' she takes after him with the chicken. Couldn' even eat that chicken when she got done. They wasn't nothing but a pair a legs in her han'. Grampa throwed his hip outa joint laughin'. How'd my folks go so easy?

I don't know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them.

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Dribking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged diety. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.

Casy said, He was foolin', all the time. I think he knowed it. An' Grampa didn' die tonight. He died the minute you took 'im off the place. You sure a that? Pa cried. Why, no. Oh, he was breathin, but he was dead. He was that place, an' he knowed it.

It's like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know--because I've got her in me His head was down and his was voice was heartbroken. You've got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn't even be wondering if you didn't have it. Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Whatever you do, it will be you who do it--not your mother.

Di sera avveniva una cosa strana: le venti famiglie diventavano una famiglia, i figli diventavano figli di tutti. La privazione della casa diventava una privazione comune, e gli anni felici nell'Ovest erano un sogno comune.

Aron felt that something had to die--his mother or his world...He got to his feet and pushed his mother back into death and closed his mind against her.

Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money—unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.

There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city—to consider himself better than his father. Enough.

You must know that a Chinese must pay all of his debts on or before our New Year's day. He starts every year clean. If he does not, he loses face; but not only that—his family loses face. There are no excuses.

Ma put down her head and she fought with a desire to cry.