Quotes About Family

He, who hated to hurt people, had to begin to deal with all the hurt his actions had wrought—for me, for the children, for Robin, for himself.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.

From Old Mortality ] ...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. Go ahead and love her, Mama said. I've wondered since whether those were Mama's last words, the final sizzle of her synapses.

But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.

I ain't got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But"—her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces—"but it's killing me to see you go.

Brenda's pouting voice broke in, "Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.

My dad has to go to Washington to work, or we wouldn't have enough money . . .

For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.

It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled as he boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other.

Brenda burst in. "Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn't fit or something. The stores don't give 'em no trouble." Her father turned in a kind of roar. "I never heard such a fool thing in my life. Didn't you hear your mother tell you to shut your mouth, girl!

It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.

daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother's hair gray.

Parents were what they were; it was not up to you to try to puzzle them out.

I had no study in those days, not even a desk or file or bookcase to call mine alone....It might have happened sooner [the writing of work worthy of publication] had I had a room of my own and fewer children, but somehow I doubt it. For as I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who took away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

We must have received our share of startled looks from the crew and other passengers—this seven-member family emerging from their third-class lower deck and climbing into a waiting chauffeur-driven limousine.

She jerked to life, her eyes wide open. "Why did that woman give me away?" Then it all began to pour out. Why had she been given away? We'd never told her she was a foundling.

I had so looked forward to her walking." Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. "Walk to Daddy," Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father's chair.

was appalled that I was heading across the world for four years, asked me: "How could you do this to your mother?" "Well," I answered, "she did it to her mother." But when my parents went to China it was different.

Jess vio cómo su padre detenía la camioneta y se inclinaba a abrir la puerta para que May Belle pudiera subir. Se volvió. Pequeña con suerte. Ella podía correr tras él y cogerle y besarle. Jess sentía un dolor por dentro cuando veía a su padre subir a las pequeñas en sus hombros o se agachaba para darles un abrazo. Le parecía que creían que era demasiado grande para esas cosas desde que nació.

Are you tired, Mary?" I asked. She raised her weary gaze to me. "My socks are tired," she said. "And my shoes won't even walk." To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we employ Mary's eloquent description of her socks.

The Womeldorf family loved music, and one of Daddy's happiest memories was of the day his father came home from town bearing a morning glory horn Edison phonograph with round cylinder records. "How on earth could that contraption sing and play lovely music?" he remembered marveling. The family considered it the wonder of the age and loved listening to it.

I was stolen from my family by Navajo raiders when I was fourteen, and taken in by a Navajo family who had lost a daughter of their own." Josefina