Quotes About Family

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

And I saw surfing that day - by Leslie Wong, among others - that made my chest hurt: long moments of grace under pressure that felt etched deep in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That night, while my family slept, I lay awake on the bamboo-framed couch, heart pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.

But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can't deny your own kin.

the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.

Then the babies started comin, the old man went on. They never heard of rubbers, I reckon, or maybe they figured that that would be cheatin. One of the youngest of them girls told me one time, she was drinkin a little or she never would have told it, she said her sisters would bury them babies in widemouth Mason fruit jars.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?

The sweetest sounds to mortals given Are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.

Among respectable people a man who took upon himself the cares and expenses of a family before he had secured a regular trade or profession, or had accumulated some capital, and who allowed his wife to lose caste, and his children to be dirty, ragged, and neglected, would be severely blamed by the public opinion of the community. The

In a community where the standard of living is high, and the conditions of production are favorable, there is a wide margin within which an individual may practise self-denial and win capital without suffering, if he has not the charge of a family. That

We are agreed that the son shall not be disgraced even by the crime of the father, much less by the crime of a more distant relative. It

There is room for both; why should they fall out? Polanus (in his Syntag. de Terræmotu) tells us of a town in the territory of Berne in Switzerland, consis ting of ninety houses, that was in the year 1584 destroyed by an earthquake, except the half of one house, where the master of the family was earnestly praying with his wife and children upon their bended knees to God.

Great Tamerlane carried the lives of his ancestors into the field with him, in which he used to read before he gave battle, that he might be stirred up not to stain the blood of his family by cowardice or any unworthy behaviour in fight.

We have scarcely gotten home ... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.

For a while, every day, even though the snow was piled and the sky dead and the winter wind was blowing, I watched for my aunt to come again and bring me a book like my ma'd said she would. She never came.

His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn't clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that.

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't.

The best sex education for kids is when Daddy pats Mommy on the fanny when he comes home from work.

Family is, after all—however irritating—family.

There's still a question I must put to you," said the cunger woman. "Can you give up Joshua to keep him?

As always, we two have fallen to reminiscing of Blossom Prairie and our life there before my father died, telling stories by the hour which both of us have heard and told so often now that it is the rhythm which stirs us more than the words, our tongues thickening steadily until the accent is barely intelligible to my Yankee wife, who listens amused, amazed, bewildered, bored, and sometimes appalled.

Home is a shelter from storms — all sorts of storms.

Having a cat is like having a pet. Having a dog is like having a really stupid brother who needs a lot of looking after.

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.