Quotes About Family

The emotional resonance between his relationship with his parents and his relationship with his wife is so strong that it leads to an unfortunate cross-wiring. Hence, the feeling that sex is "wrong," almost incestuous. When a partner starts to feel too familial, sex will inevitably be the casualty. Ironic as it may seem, at that moment the taboo of infidelity feels less transgressive than sex at home.

No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers.

Watching love die: that's an ornery armor-piercing bullet. When taking the kids to school, the laundry, and the dishes rain down on the last remaining coals of your romance like piss on a morning campfire. When all you're left with is enough smoke to choke on. Then your heart is dead.

Up home we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it," her mother used to say. "We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.

A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.

When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.

Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps on the hour. Our devoted mother would pass them for us, after first running them in a hot oven to kill the germs. They came into our hands curled up and warm, sometimes scorched like toast.

She (my mother) stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in different, respectful, complicated ways.

He's blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain," Mrs. Martello said proudly. "And he's going in surgery just as soon as they get him all fixed up for it. He's got a malignancy.

He was like a young, undriven, unfalsifying, unvindictive Fay. So Fay might have appeared, just at the beginning, to her aging father, with his slipping eyesight.

Here at his own home, inside his own front door, there was nobody who seemed to be taken by surprise at what had happened to Judge McKelva. Laurel seemed to remember that Presbyterians were good at this.

She felt as though in death her father had been asked to bear the weight of that raised lid himself, and hold it up by lying there, the same way he'd lain on the hospital bed and counted the minutes and the hours to make his life go by. She stood by the coffin as she had by his bed, waiting it out with him.

My Best Bread, written out twenty or thirty years ago in her mother's strict, pointed hand, giving everything but the steps of the procedure. (A cook is not exactly a fool.)

I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along we both became comics, making each other laugh.

FIRE CHIEF: Life is very simple, really. [To the Smiths:] Go on and kiss each other.

We've eaten well this evening. That's because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith.

PROFESSOR: Good, let's go on. I tell you, let's go on . . . How would you say, for example, in French: the roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who was Asiatic?

Your father goes out. He meets his friends in barrooms or at the Club. You and Jamie have the boys you know. You go out. But I'm alone. I've always been alone.

As the father of two young girls, I have come to the realization that they are just as messy as boys but the dirt that they create around the house is comprised of at least 50% glitter.

I'd left them because I'd loved them. Beth and my parents and my friends and my life-my free, American life. I loved them, and if I had a chance to protect them from the people who wanted to destroy them then I had to take that chance even if it meant I would never see them again.