Quotes About Family

Anthropology, she thought, like charity, surely begins at home.

And food made with love, she thought, tasted better-everybody knew that. It just did.

And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?

When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.

So they decided to consult a cousin who was a prominent psychiatrist. He examined Antonio—whom he knew well, anyway—and declared him insane, which of course he wasn't, even by Italian standards.

that weddings are far more than marriage ceremonies; we know that they are occasions for family stock-taking and catharsis; that

Children, like cats, made a house into a home, and the echoes of their presence lingered.

And then," Mma Potokwane continued, "you have a successful business. You have the two children. You have your Zebra Drive home. You have so much, Mma." She looked at her friend with a touch of reproach. "You have nothing further to achieve, Mma. Nothing.

I'm taking on another person's memories, another person's family, another person's life. Love obscured all of that because if it did not, then nobody would marry at all, and there had to be marriage, didn't there, if people wanted to continue, have children, keep everything going…

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do--he is finished.

we don't see our parents as people. Your daddy was also a man—a very good man too—but he was a man.

Mother was right, you know. It's an odd thing, isn't it: you never want your mother to be right, but the older you get, the more right you realise your mother was. All those things that mothers say, all those annoying things, turn out to be right.

these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one..They had a daughter...who was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either.

That's perfect," he said. "I'm sorry about that. It's genetic, I think. My mother had exactly the same problem, and a cousin of hers too. We're allergic to raw onion.

now: he had a kind wife who had a very good government job and he had a house with new furniture, purchased on his wife's salary, and a car that went with his wife's job. All of that was far more important than being noticed by women, and yet, and yet…

It was all very well occupying the moral high ground on electoral reform, but what really mattered, she thought, was how you treated your mother.

but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken—"sheep cloud"—as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. "The weather," he had once said to her, smiling, "is German. I don't know why; it just is. Sorry.

You'd think he'd look more ashamed of himself, said Bertie. You'd think that he'd look more ashamed of being a Campbell.

It defeated him that anybody could ever bring such a result about if they knew, or could imagine, the heartbreak of the victim's family. Of course the people who did these things were usually deficient in moral imagination—they could not see what it would be like because they simply lacked the capacity to do so.

you want to be charitable, then I think you should start at home—right under your nose—and give Charlie more money, rather than help this distant cousin—so distant that we'd need binoculars to see him, Mma.

The world was a lonely place, a place of transience, of change, of loss; only the bonds, the ties of friendship and family protect us from the loneliness

It had given her pleasure to do things for him in his lifetime, and now it was a pleasure to do things for his memory. But the memory of a father went only so far.

Families come in different ways... sometimes they are given to you, but sometimes you find them yourself, unexpectedly, as you go through life.

was particularly hard for women now, when there were so many children left without