Family Relationships Quotes

Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David's family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best.

~ Liz Moore

My brother trolled recovery and support groups, searching for women with dependency issues, the way I frequented bookstores with the hope of finding a well-adjusted, intelligent woman. Between us, his record was more stellar, his sin more reprehensible; though, knowing my brother, he slept soundly through the night without ever experiencing the slightest remorse.

~ Richard J. O'brien

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.

~ Sergio Troncoso

...one can never leave home...one carries the shadows, the dreams, the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes...

~ Maya Angelou

Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn't. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.

~ Tana French

Our life stories are largely constructed and without mindfulness can prove destructive.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Family are people who never earn your respect or love but demand it nevertheless.

~ Greg Keyes

How did so many women get to this unhappy place of not understanding how truly simple men are in their requirements and how much benevolent power their wives have over them? Why did notions like assuaging male ego and using feminine wiles rocket into disrepute? How is it that so many women are angry with men in general yet expect to have a happy life married to one of them?There are a number of reasons for this, and I believe they all revolve around the assault upon, and virtual collapse of, the values of religious morality, modesty, fidelity, chastity, respect for life, and a commitment to family and child-rearing.

~ Laura Schlessinger

Don’t destroy yourself over somebody else’s foolishness. I know they betrayed you. I know they lied on you. I know they talked behind your back and told all of your business. I know they hurt you to the core. I know they turned their back on you. I know they cheated on you. I know they mislead you. I know, I KNOW. In spite of it all, you have to know that you are worth more than what they dished out to you. You will survive! You will make it through! Remember who YOU are and know YOUR self-worth!

~ Stephanie Lahart

But we left camp after a while and we was driving in a real spooky place cause all the roads up near camp are dark and in the woods and we had to drive for a while to get to a highway cause there was no street lights or anything and nothing but woods and my dad asked me if I had a good time and I told him I did, but that’s really a lie and I felt like telling him what it was like at that mean old camp, but I thought he’d get mad and tell me I’m making it up and I thought I’d tell him some other time like Febuary and cause I didn’t think he’d believe me anyway, but so I changed my mind and then I thought I should tell him now cause he’ll wonder howcome I never told him sooner, so when he said that’s a nasty gash and when he said what did I do, stumble on the trail and hit a big rock or something? I told him no and I told him that lots of bad things happened to me at camp and that I never want to go there again cause I hate it and I almost cried. But he said I always had a bibid emigination cause he’s sure it wasn’t that bad! And I don’t know about those big words either, but what he said made me kind of mad cause grownups always think they know what happened to you better than you do yourself.

~ Timothy Victor Richardson

Her mother told her once that her father was sick. That the sickness made him do it. She made it seem logical. As if he was lying in a hospital bed with cancer rather than rotting in a prison cell for rape and murder.

~ Anais Torres

I was so ashamed for a mistake I made unknowingly when I was completely out of control and lost my mind for some reasons. I thought about to end my life next day at some point. I was struggling to cope with my pain, shame and thinking about others who I had hurt unintentionally. The worst moment came when people who I loved most had pulled out their support and threatens me to end relationships. Lesson learns hard way that people who are not with you at worst time of your life have no right to stand beside you when you are at best. Life goes on...........

~ Sammy Toora Powerlifter

When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also back before parents used any sort of common sense whatsoever. It was a time when you didn’t raise your children. You just fed them and they got bigger.

~ Dina Kucera

It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.

~ Kate Morton

Here’s what I learned about life when we were going through that. We’re all human and mortal. We’re all going to suffer and die. But it’s how we are with each other during those times that proves God’s here with us.” He turned his hand over in mine and entwined our fingers. “He comes in through people. People who love us anyway. They jump right into the chaos with us and try to help us make sense of it. That’s what mercy is…it’s choosing to help, or forgive, or love even when it goes against all logic.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.

~ Benay Nordby

Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than simply a book about a kid who dreams of stardom, Fame Shark is a thoughtful, hilarious and moving love letter to his family and the Lower East Side of New York City.

~ Kristen Johnston

Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

~ Brit Bennett

Is she a friend of yours?”“No,” Diana said flatly. “She’s my mother.

~ Erin O'riordan

There are many things for which I owe gratitude to my dad. Most of all, I am grateful to the only man who could love my mother more than me.

~ Ron Mayes

And you, Mom. I loved you. You've asked if i felt and understood that you loved me. of course I did. And you know this. I loved your love because it kept me safe and happy and wanted, and it existed beyond words and hugs and eyes.

~ Lisa Genova

Controlling others is the cornerstone of dysfunctional families.

~ David W. Earle

Everything's temporary...until it's not.

~ Renata Suerth

I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn’t admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with—the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be.

~ Pat Conroy

A child that’s being abused by its parents doesn’t stop loving its parents, it stops loving itself.

~ Shahida Arabi

I'm not the boss of my house. I don't know how I lost it, I don't know when I lost it, I don't really think I ever had it. But I've seen the boss's job...and I don't want it!

~ Bill Cosby

You know the saying? Don't go in if you don't have a skin.

~ Jackie Williams

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

~ Laura Kasischke

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations....

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?

~ Rebecca Solnit

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Sophie clutched Grant tighter. 'I don’t know what screwed-up messages from your family are floating around in your head right now, but you’re staying right here.

~ Jennifer Lane

In the end, we all die for what we believe in... mostly because we all die.

~ Nazareth Bergeron

They want me to contain the raging fires within me. They need me to appreciate glowing embers, to understand that even weak flames need to be managed with a lot of careful planning.

~ Jinat Rehana Begum

This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.

~ Brooke Hayward

Shame is the demon that keeps many of us trapped in our pain, healing comes when we gain the courage to confront our demon(s).

~ J'son M. Lee

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

~ Arthur Miller

...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.

~ Marceline Loridan-Ivens