Quotes About Family

Lucas adds: Even so, there is something that has always struck me in the photos . . . my father often looks sad. I guess he didn't like having to smile on command.

Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry—she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.

Je dis : et ton père, tu crois qu'il est le genre à appeler ? Il me dévisage à nouveau longuement. Je suis à nouveau pétrifié par sa ressemblance. Il dit : ça, c'est vous qui savez. Je suis sûr que vous le connaissez beaucoup mieux que moi.

Mon frère meurt.

Il serre la jolie poupée dans ses bras maigres, il la serre comme si sa vie en dépendait, il la serre comme il serrerait une vraie petite fille, silencieuse, tranquille et éternelle, une petite fille de l'aube et de l'orient. Son unique petite fille. La petite-fille de Monsieur Linh.

Elle ne devait pas penser à sa fille, car on ne songe jamais vraiment aux vivants avec l'intensité qu'ils méritent et que seule leur mort parvient à faire naître en nous.

An old man is standing on the after-deck of a ship. In his arms he clasps a flimsy suitcase and a newborn baby, even lighter than the suitcase. The old man's name is Monsieur Linh. He is the only person who knows this is his name because all those who once knew it are dead.

J'ai fait de ma fille un être de papier. J'ai tous les soirs transformé mon bureau en théâtre d'encre où se jouaient encore ses aventures inventées.

Des années après que mon frère avait déserté ma chambre, après avoir mis en terre tous ceux qui m'étaient chers, j'offrai enfin à Simon la sépulture à laquelle il n'avait jamais eu droit. Il allait y dormir, en compagnie des enfants qui avaient connu son destin, sur cette page portant sa photo, ses dates si rapprochées et son nom, dont l'orthographe différait si peu du mien. Ce livre serait sa tombe.

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.

People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct.

You backed family. Right or wrong, if you are able to count on only one person to take your side, it should unquestionably be someone with whom you share blood.

When I was born it was Simon who they'd put once more into his arms, the dream of a child he could mold in his own image. It certainly wasn't me, a half-baked attempt at life, a rough sketch showing no familiar traits whatsoever.

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

I decided I would go with them, but it would be at my father's house that I would eat. I would share his food, and his poverty.

In addition to such mother-in-law violence toward a daughter-in-law, Burbank notes that "women aggress against their co-wives verbally in twenty-nine percent of the societies and physically in eighteen percent of the societies. Sisters-in-law also "aggress against one another in fourteen percent of the societies; mothers-in law and daughters-in-law are an aggressive dyad in twelve percent of the societies

most girls and boys continue to experience childhood in father-dominated, father-absent, and/or mother-blaming families.

Women who have been repeatedly raped in childhood—often by authority figures in their own families—are traumatized human beings; as such, they are often diagnosed as borderline personalities.

feminist therapist believes that a woman needs to be told that she's not crazy; that it's normal to feel sad or angry about being overworked, underpaid, underloved; that it's healthy to harbor fantasies of running away when the needs of others (aging parents, needy husbands, demanding children) threaten to overwhelm her.

Women have lost custody of their children for these very reasons—pronounced unfit by courtroom psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

My husband is so cheap. On Christmas Eve he fires one shot and tells the kids Santa committed suicide.

Christmas is a time when everybody wants his past forgotten and his present remembered.

My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.