Quotes About Family

Did he ever love me as much as he loved all this? I didn't suspect him of going to porn on his computer. I never saw any evidence of that. It didn't take away his sexual energy exactly; it took away his attention and the energy to conduct any family socializing. It certainly dampened down romance.

don't say "pity" again,' I warned. 'I blame myself for who I am and where I am, and that includes friends and family.' He laughed. 'Maybe you are too hard on yourself. You can't underestimate the power of coincidence and fate. They have a lot to do with who and what you are. Look at us. If I hadn't been standing in that spot in the supermarket and you weren't distracted, we might never have met.

Kelly stepped out from behind him and my father showed more emotion. Parents always give their grandchildren more affection, I thought. It's as if when their children reach a certain age, that display has to be constricted and put into storage until the grandchildren come along and it can be revived.

Elise Shelly, whose parents were divorced, told her that Elise's mother said people fall in love for ten minutes, get married and follow the dots. She finally figured out that Elise's mother meant they do everything together afterward because that's the way it was supposed to be and not because they wanted to, passionately.

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.

A family is a group of people who have different versions of the same experience.

I realize I've been calling out to Dad just like he's been calling out to me. Telling him the same thing the whole time. Not words from my mouth through the air, but from my heart through the earth, so only the two of us could hear it. FIND ME.

Fuck you. You think this is a scene in some indie drama you take my wife to in the Village, some pack of lies the guy at the Times said was so naturalistically performed. But in real life? We're bad actors. We're slobs who actually hurt. You don't feel it, you couldn't, but the pain you're causing us—causing my family—it's destroying our lives, what we have together. What we had.

My mother was predominately a stay-at-home mom.

Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.

Father probably expected me to fight back, to compete, to try to prove myself... and for Sera to have to try harder to measure up to that. He'd never understood. His approval had stopped being important to me the moment he'd written his elder son off as dead.

I'd always thought "die" would have more symmetry in the last line, but when I'd brought it up to my parents, they'd accused me of being needlessly fatalistic.

I wasn't going to compete with her for Father's approval, but that didn't mean I couldn't find a way to make this into entertainment of my own.

Trust within a family sounded so reasonable on the surface.

And I'd ask the goddess to give my brother back. It was the only way to bring my family back together.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields they laughed all the time.

There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children.

I guess that's a sign of growing up: When your dad shuts up but you can hear him anyway.

It's still home, Cager, and there's something about home, no matter how untidy we've left it.

I've always been shocked and waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop that a girl would ever talk to me, let alone want to marry me. They always seem to hold the power to me, and from my mother to my wife to my daughter, every time I try to really figure them out, and think I've got them pegged, I pay for it.

The biggest threat to children is always inside their houses. The predator with the ski-mask who grabs the kid out of a van, while a real thing, is a tiny percentage of those who prey upon children. Most victimization of children is within the Circle of Trust — not necessarily a parent, but somebody who was let into that circle, who can be a counselor, or a coach, or someone at a day-care center. The biggest danger to children is that they're perceived as property, not human beings.

It's the family you choose that counts.

A dog is like a person—he needs a job and a family to be what he's meant to be.