Quotes About Family

It doesn't take vows or genetics to be a family. We are one already, Ethan said. But i want to make it official. I want to make it forever.

I talk every day to people who smile through tears in describing their lost loved ones, their own lives building on the foundations of those who are no longer here.     My grandfather has been lonely since my grandmother's death, of course. In some ways he is waiting quietly for his own, hoping that it will be, as he often points out, as good an

Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents; their parents exist to honor them. [...] Ronan was mine but he never belonged to me. This is not an issue of ownership. A child is not a couch.

Sitting with Ronan on the couch I often thought 'How can I make this moment more precious? and then I'd realize with a sense of panic that no additional meaning needed to be sought or found. This was all there was. 'But still', I would think, 'What if I can't remember the way his hands feel, his hair. What if I forget how he smells? The sound of his laugh? The shape of his two front teeth?' Time was both too contracted and forever seeming.

Ronan lived in the world held by people who loved him and fed him and talked with him and met him on his own terms. When he died, he will have been fully loved from his first breath to his last and then after. That full uncompromising love, powerful and sometimes painful, was perhaps the only miracle worth believing in.

I'm the family oddball, you see. Not a black sheep, I haven't done anything dreadful. They just don't know what to do with me, exactly.

Maybe I'm a human, but I'm a me-and-Ma as well.

It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers.

I watch his hands, they're lumpy but clever. Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents? Steppa laughs. Folks with other things to do?

Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers. Also when I tell her what I'm thinking and she tells me what she's thinking, our each ideas jump into our other's head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

But for me, Room is a peculiar (and no doubt heretical) battle between Mary and the Devil for young Jesus. If God sounds absent from that triangle, that's because I think that for a small child, God's love is represented, and proved, by mother-love.

Now I feel bad I didn't give her the second quarter. Grandma says that's called having a conscience.

by her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; 'circle' sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.

Daughter, he said in a voice like old wood breaking, can you ever forgive me? I could only answer his question with one of my own. Putting my hand over his mouth, I whispered, Which of us would not sell all we had to stay alive?

Por qué se ha reído de que sepa todas las palabras, si yo no lo decía en broma?— le pregunto a mamá. — Ah, qué más da, siempre es bueno hacer reír a la gente

Grandma says there's more of him. What? Persons like him, in the world. Ah, says Ma. Is it true? Yeah. But the tricky thing is, there's far more people in the middle. Where? Ma's staring out the window but I don't know at what. Somewhere between good and bad, she says. Bits of both stuck together.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.

I tried to remember what it was the old ones used to sprinkle on us children at Halloween in the part of the country where Tim and I had grown up.

I'd actually rather not have you thinking about that stuff every time you look at me, OK? There's more tears rolling down Grandma. Sweetie, she says, all I think when I look at you is hallelujah.

Everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults.

It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made of her cells so I'm kind of hers. Also, when I tell her what I'm thinking and she tells me what she's thinking, our ideas jump into our other's heads, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green. -Jack from Room by Emma Donoghue

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection. I know this to be true.

Families are weird. You'd think that people who live and eat and sleep in the same place would always have a lot in common. But sometimes they don't have anything in common AT ALL. You can have a brother who really likes ballet and a sister who thinks it's girlie. You could probably have Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse in the same family; they're that weird.