Quotes About Family

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.

Families break up when people take hints you don't intend and miss hints you do intend.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He is more particular.... The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: 'He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.

I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality and love .

But I will tell you what I say to my children: 'Go where you will; commit what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; you can never commit any crime that will shut my door, my arms, or my heart to you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend.

The real question is, can we prevent the ignorant, the poor, the vicious, from filling the world with their children?

it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?' Strike thought of his own bizarre family history. 'Probably,' he said.

Robin felt her luck, these days, at having two loving parents. Her work had taught her how many people weren't that fortunate, how many people had families that were broken beyond repair, how many adults walked around carrying invisible scars from their earliest childhood, their perceptions and associations forever altered by lack of love, by violence, by cruelty.

Thanks for the balloon donkey. Perfect timing. My old one's nearly deflated. She received an answer sixty seconds later. Great. I was worried it was so obvious, everybody would've got you one. See you at 5. Light-hearted now, Robin drank tea, ate her toast and returned downstairs to open her family's presents.

The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won't be alone, you have something you've built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself 'people,' because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.

Birthdays in Lucy's world were always celebrated, never forgotten: there must be cake and candles and cards and presents; time must be marked, order preserved, traditions upheld.

The problem wasn't that Robin didn't think she'd love her child. On the contrary, she thought it likely that she would love that child to the extent that this job, for which she had voluntarily sacrificed a marriage, her safety, her sleep and her financial security, would have to be sacrificed in return. And how would she feel, afterward, about the person who'd made that sacrifice necessary?

Handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give.

Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?

Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might've been epoch defining—'it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy's portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows'—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

In a family there is always something or other going awry… Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women's rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother's or the sister's boyfriend...

The argument had been in full swing when Matthew's father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew's mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething. It was

We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reason - my hero's preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succor and all else is projected, all else is invented

Your mother," he said, in a deep Borders accent, "was a fucking whore." Strike laughed. "Maybe so," he said, bleeding and smoking in the darkness as the sirens grew louder, "but she loved me, Donnie. I heard yours didn't give a shit about you, little policeman's bastard that you were.