Quotes About Family

But he'd survived his mother's death. I figured he'd survive my best intentions.

Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.

Home cooking is always concerned with quality, because people you care about will eat the meal.

Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning—or choosing—to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.

In 1849 a Titusville sawmill owner, Ebenezer Brewer, had sent to his son Francis Brewer, a young physician practicing in Vermont, five gallons of Seneca oil from the creek that ran below his sawmill, "with the assurance," his son said later, "that it possessed great medicinal and curative properties.

His problem, his son believed, was "too many irons in the fire": a nice cliché for an industrialist and inventor who worked with kilns. "One by one, his inventions fell into other hands, some by fair sale, but most of them by piracy, when it became known that he had nothing left wherewith to maintain his rights. In short, with seven children to provide for, he found himself a ruined man."12

My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the "need to adore." It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as "one God before you" (Exodus 20:3).

is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to "honor your father and mother"? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the "dominant consciousness" of our cultures.

The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.

Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if "church family" is not also a family that one has to eventually "hate" in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

The body is like the ignored middle child in a family unit, and so now it is having its revenge through so much compulsive eating, sexuality, anorexia, and addiction, plus a wholesale disregard for the physical planet, animals, water, and healthy foods.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.

My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

Miles smiled. Can you keep a secret? Bea snorted. Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter? No, Miles conceded. Well, then, she said, as if that settled the matter.

David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there's, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom is always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you only think about the past and the future.