Quotes About Family

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.

No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn't twinship, and it wasn't romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.

And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

A child just wants to love her parents and to be loved, and it seems like it should be simple to do that, but sometimes it's not.

Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage." Neither

I've decided that there should be a national holiday once a year, when grown children have to let their parents tuck them in one more time.

Having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations.

for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

Families always seem to me like this weird accident." "What do you mean?" Opal asked. "I don't know," said Erica. She gestured with both hands, fingers splayed. "It's almost as if a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to be together all drew straws and somehow wound up on the same commune.

Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

No one told you that in moments of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

here I was: shouting compliments about Joe through the mayonnaise-colored living room of my childhood and hoping I would start to believe them.

She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her.

The two Lucys are going to go to the movies with Eli and I," Robby said, "Great. And you have English teachers for parents.

she would be able to tend their son with a mother's warrior love.

You've got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn't that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don't feel the need to describe . . . I don't know, her pubic hair in literary terms: 'a burnt-sienna nimbus,' or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.

The Kadetskys were atheists—"lowercase a," her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.