Quotes About Family

It had been almost 7 o'clock, the end of a long working day. Of course he should've been at home with Emily by then, but that evening - as on many other evenings - he had told her that he needed to work late, not so that he could slip away and spend a few hours with his mistress (Benjamin would never have a mistress), but so that he could snatch 30 minutes solitude alone with a book and his thoughts before coming home to the deeper, more oppressive solitude of his shared domestic life.

Mi hija tenía razón: la gente joven no se fija en los sentimientos de sus padres, ni siquiera es consciente de ellos la mayor parte del tiempo. Viven en un bendito estado de sociopatía en lo que respecta a las emociones de sus padres.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there's a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn't want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there's some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing.

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact. The family was the house's soul.

that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.

Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.

Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.

There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.

I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness...much more the foundation than the church (or temple) or the school can ever be.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids' response to her.

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

I'm just happy you're home safely.

Don't you love me, Mother?" Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn't capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love.

It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

There was no arguing with blood.

Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.