Quotes About Family

Blood is thicker than water, so the fact that I have my sister always with me, it's like you always have someone who's your best friend and always have someone who has your back. You can always trust your family, and I'm lucky to have that.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.

I honestly think there shouldn't be sugared drinks. All my grandchildren drink water all through the day. I've just had them to stay, and at breakfast, they have water. They don't even know what sugary drinks are.

My mom put me and my sisters in the water to feel comfortable, to have water safety.

My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they'd read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.

I keep a picture of my beloved children close by. Also, water and plenty of pads and pens.

If I close my eyes, I can remember the first apartment where I lived with my family in Newark, N.J., in the late 1930s. The rooms were lined up like train cars - you had to go through one to get to another - and there wasn't any heat or hot water.

It's not about being rich, but everyone back home has a pool. And I was a total water baby. My mom couldn't get me out - she'd put my dinner plate at the end of the pool, and I'd eat my meals in the water.

We had a cistern for water. My grandmother churned butter and made lye soap. She and my mother did the washing in a wash kettle outdoors, using a fire to heat the water. That's the way they did the wash until the 1950s.

I loved playing every sport. Soccer, water polo, horses. Whatever. I just loved it - especially competing against my brothers.

I would not drink bottles of water at my mom's house because I never knew how long she'd been refilling them from the sink and putting them back in the refrigerator.

We had a house in Baga, Goa, that we would visit every Christmas vacation. It was called Love House. The toilet was outside the house. We had no water; someone had to get it from the well. My dad was huge then, but he could walk, go to the local tavern, have a beer and take an auto back.

One time, I pranked my sister: I put red solo cups in her room on her floor and filled them with water. Then I put string all over so you couldn't get anywhere.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't bless myself with holy water and then get in my car and rub the medal of the Virgin Mary that she gave me and say a Hail Mary for my mother. And then I kiss her Mass card that's right there on the dashboard.

When I was 13 years old, my family and I lived on a farm in Puerto Rico that didn't have clean, running water all the time.

Health has always been an important thing to me. I exercise and try to take care of myself, and drink a lot of water! And I push that to my kids so that they can carry on that same energy.

I remember not having a hot water tank, so we had to use a kettle for hot showers. So, you know, we would put the kettle on and go have a shower, and then my mum would come bring three or four kettles in, just to heat them up. And it would take five, 10 minutes for every kettle to heat up.

When I was 6 years old, we were lighting firecrackers in the backyard and started a fire. My brother ran out and was pulling water from the creek and pouring it on the fire with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

My brother Bill, who is a year older, is a climber, and when I was in the seventh grade, he taught me how to rappel off the frozen waterfall in our backyard.

My father lost his leg in 1927 playing soccer. A kick broke his leg; gangrene set in. They sawed it off. So he didn't get what a lot of Irish immigrants got, which was a job on the Waterfront - he didn't get that.

Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father - I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.

I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It's music that feels like home to me.

I feel like a different person since my mum passed away, like I'm driving a ship with my husband alongside me and we're leading these four children into unknown waters.