Quotes About Family

My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard and I left it once, before I was finished, and he remained there with his big, empty worry.

But Urashima had remembered his old parents, and in Japan the duty to parents is stronger than everything else, stronger even than pleasure or love, and he would not be persuaded, but answered:

Thus did the unkind step-mother humble herself and ask forgiveness of the girl she had so wronged.

Small children disturb your sleep, big children your life.

Parenthood is not some special currency," Iris said. "Being a parent is not a status thing." "Surely they're superior in one way? They've done things we've been unable to do." "What, procreation? The turkeys do it. All those dogs and cats do it. Your bees, too. Fuck and breed.

The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

There's a reason for every relationship, that's what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one's on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don't end up randomly as father and daughter, that's for sure.

but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory.

Only later, when I met more girls, when I got to know my nieces and nephews, did I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.

But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother's stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?

There is never as good a parent as the one who doesn't give birth to a child,

Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son.

The daughter who had escaped the sad fate envisioned by her mother had become a mother herself, and was now horrified that the ghost of her mother's fear had decided to make its home in her own heart.

How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves.

and left. When the three children died in the same year she remained indifferent to Nikolai's loss. Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child.

Quant à l'endroit où se trouvait mon père, le jour de ses funérailles, ma mère me l'avait indiqué. C'est un peu loin, mais un jour ou l'autre nous irons le rejoindre, il n'y a pas à craindre de s'égarer. Ton papa est gentil, il est seulement parti devant pour voir comment c'était, m'avait-elle dit.

I just want to be healthy and stay alive and keep my family going and everything and keep my friends going and try to do something so that this world will be peaceful. That is the most ambitious and the most difficult thing, but I'm there trying to do it.

Unfortunately, there is much mediocre philosophy in circulation, and so one sometimes hears it said that There is no such thing as a family, only the individuals who make up the family. This is analogous to the claim that There is no such thing as a table, only the atoms that make up the table—which we also hear on occasion. But in reality, there are not only atoms and molecules. There are also tables.

Interactions between fathers and children are the starting point of education.

People tend to be put off by the idea of selling sex, but if you spend a winter's night with one of them and talk with her about her family and so on, you're likely to find she's just like any other woman.

One thing is certain, wherever we go there is a proof that the people are keeping the commandments of the Lord, especially the first one -- to multiply and replenish the earth.