Quotes About Family

Physical punishment teaches children that the larger, stronger person has the power to get his way, whether or not he is in the right, and they may resent this in the parent-for life.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude . . .

Yeah, size is no guarantee of power," said George. "Look at Ginny." "What d'you mean?" said Harry. "You've never been on the receiving end of one of her Bat-Bogey Hexes, have you?

As a parent, my fear is that when we die, we'll have to watch all those moments in our lives when we were short tempered with our children, all the times they needed our love and we didn't give it, all those times we were distracted or in a bad mood, and all the times we were angry or impatient. My fear is that when the time comes, I'll have to watch all those moments again. That they'll make us watch them before we can get into Heaven

Like everything else, the beans had exploded with growth in the last few days. "Holy jumping garbanzos!" my father declared. My mother answered with, "Great leapin' limas!

My forefathers didn't come over on the May-flower, but they met the boat.

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364.

Mothers are the only race of people that speak the same tongue.

We would also have to say goodbye to the joy of watching this next generation soak up the massive quantities of love their grandmother would have given them, and seeing them learn that there was someone in the world who loved them as much as their parents did: a grandmother who was delighted by all their quirks and who thought they were the most amazing creatures on earth.

If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us.

Books had always been a way for my mother and me to introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy, and they had also always given us something to talk about when we were stressed or anxious.

In December 2008, I had the book with me while we waited for Dr. O'Reilly. Mom had already finished it. Every time I put the book down to go grab some mocha, or check my email, or make a call, I returned to find Mom rereading it, sneakily wolfing down passages as though I'd left behind a bag of cookies, not a book, and she was scooping up crumbs behind my back.

No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob's death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.

But mostly, when I look back, what I remember is not Mom rushing about; it's Mom sitting quietly in the center of the house, in the living room, under the swirling colors of a Paul Jenkins painting; there would be a fire in the fireplace and a throw over her lap, her hands sticking out to hold a book. And we all wanted to be there with her and Dad, reading quietly too.

We were terrified to stop, stop anything, and admit that something was wrong. Activity, frenzied activity, seemed to be the thing we all felt we needed. Only Dad slowed down, and that wasn't until he was trapped in a hospital getting intravenous antibiotics. Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.

I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom's dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been.

I particularly like that last phrase," Mom said. "About protecting your own happiness.

And a piece of advice that she thought was one of the most important things she wanted to pass on: You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you're proud of them too.

I did manage to read some pages from a book that's also about how people can find strength they didn't know they had." "What book was that?" "The Book of Common Prayer," Mom answered. "Didion?" "No, Will." Mom's voice was somewhere between amused and exasperated. "The other one." And then she added, smiling: "Besides, I think the Didion is A Book of Common Prayer, not 'The Book.'

Mom agreed but pointed out that she'd been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. "I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn't what you give in exchange for something; it's what you feel when you are blessed—blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.

and sister and father and mother had. I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.