Quotes About Family

I heard her family might be moving to Anchorage. Seriously? I would die if I had to move there. I don't know, with all the UV rays here, it seems like Anchorage might actually provide a longer life span. You don't need as much sunblock, so it's a more economical choice as well.

Nina isn't going to like this, hissed Aunt Tatiana. I'm not married to Nina, I retorted.

I love being a dad. I'd have more kids if I could. I'd take a couple more, one or two more before I croak.

You know, no matter what I am or what I do for a living, I'm still, you know, the husband and the dad and the protector of the house, and I have to be conscientious about that.

I've spent a lot of Thanksgivings on the road with my band, so anytime that I can spend Thanksgiving with my family in a traditional aspect, eating sweet potatoes and cranberries and stuffing and all the trappings of Thanksgiving and then get on a treadmill the next day extra long, I'm happy.

War happens inside a man," Eric Sevareid concluded. "It happens to one man alone. It can never be communicated.… A million martyred lives leave an empty place at only one family table.

There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.

I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don't need anybody.

They named him James, for Charlie's daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.

everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you're going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.

And, thought it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother and loved us boys. I never gave her a reason. It was just the kind of person she was.

My Uncle Jimbo never challenged a man to a duel to defend his honor, but he did win a $20 bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. My grandmother prayed a tornado away, and punched a city woman in the eye.

He is just something that happened to us, in a time of loss and sadness and sickness and uncertainty, when, as the boy Little Arliss said in Old Yeller, we needed us a dog.

They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul.

And, thought it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother and love us boys. I never gave her a reason. It was just the kind of person she was.

I had seen my mother cry from pain and grief and misery, when I was a child. I had never seen her cry from happiness until they called out my name and I walked up to get that prize, then handed it to her.

Her driveway is about a quarter-mile long. She walks to the mailbox, for her health. "Now they all follow her in a straight line, all of them, there and back," my brother told me.

On every pack leaned an M16, except Lori's. Her son was playing soldier with it in the bleachers. There was no clip in it, which was a good thing.

But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol' life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.

The children ate their spice cake with Kool-Aid.

You're the guy they depend on when things go bad, when they need somebody to pull them out of the ditch, or clear the road with your chainsaw, or jump them off in the middle of the night. "People will line up to say this stuff over you, like they did Grandpa," I said. My kin could recall how they could see the headlights coming for miles down those twisting mountain roads, the night he left this earth.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

One: Don't kill yourself. Two: Don't kill each other. Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain't fam'ly.