Family Relationships Quotes

I looked at my little family all smiling and quite happy at the thought that Charlie had tried to maim or kill Mr. Lomax - or at least blow up his van - and I realized then that I was the only normal one.

~ Nina Stibbe

This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars.

~ Nayomi Munaweera

Can I sleep with you? asked Oz. Kinda scary in my room. Pretty sure I saw a troll in the corner. Lou said, Get up here. Oz climbed next to her. Oz suddenly looked troubled. When you get married, who am I going to come get in bed with when I'm scared, Lou? One day you're gonna get bigger than me, then I'm going to be running to you when I get scared. How do you know that? Because that's the deal God makes between big sisters and their little brothers.

~ Baldacci

I suppose that's the reason I believe that as long as there is someone in charge of the household, someone who can maintain order among its members, someone who is clearly mature and established as a person, someone, in other words, like my mother, then eventually all who live under the same roof, despite blood ties or lineage, will at one point become family. Such a simple idea, but one that took a while for me to catch on to.Oh, and another thing.If the same people don't spend enough time in a home, even if they are connected by blood, their bonds will slowly fade away like a familiar landscape.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

The blessing begins at home.

~ Taka Sande

Keep your heart wide open and you’ll be received with open hearts — not by everyone, but to be received by one open heart is more than worth the journey.

~ Marnie Grundman

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior. Mothers cannot make children think, feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior. We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck. At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves—or within the child or the child’s father, for that matter. There is never one villain in family life, although it may appear that way on the surface.

~ Harriet Lerner

But early on I saw this: You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

~ Elizabeth Strout

So also in a marriage or in helping a teenager through a difficult identity crisis—there is no quick fix, where you can just move in and make everything right with a positive mental attitude and a bunch of success formulas.

~ Stephen Covey

At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.

~ William Maxwell

I felt a surge of love for my aunt. We disagreed about so many things, yet here was family: the people who kept dancing with you, even after the music stopped.

~ Sibella Giorello

Dad has shamelessly played the Mom card. Against which there is no defense.

~ Denis Markell

like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.

~ James Hannaham

It is so unkind--' 'Perhaps. But sometimes a compulsion comes over one to speak the truth!

~ Agatha Christie

You daughter is prudish?” There was a gleam of triumph in Helena Winter’s face. Fee grimaced. Prudish? No, not that she could claim. Far too mild a word for what she felt.

~ Mary Brock Jones

..All of us are vulnerable to intense, non-productive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family—in particular, losses and cutoffs. If we do not observe and understand how our triangles operate, our anger can keep us stuck in the past, rather than serving as an incentive and guide to form more productive relationship patterns for the future.

~ Harriet Lerner

Holy crap, Caleb! You're my uncle. NickNo! CalebIt's worse. He's the half-brother of your great-grandfather. KodyYou're not helping. CalebNo, but I'm entertaining myself at your adorable expense. KodyYeah, y'all are missing the important fact. To a Cajun, that makes him my uncle. NickGreat. I always wanted to be a monkey's uncle. Nice to know I finally succeeded. Caleb

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I prick my hand as I seize the rose from her. “I’ll think about it.” A small spot of blood forms on my palm and I realize I’ve been bleeding on the inside this whole time, all these years. It was only a matter of time before it showed on the outside.

~ Tracy Krimmer

Our worth comes from the promises we keep.

~ Sunanda J. Chatterjee

He was supposed to be the first man to tell her that she was beautiful and help her determine who she was before anyone had the opportunity to label her. She was supposed to be his “little girl”.

~ Anais Torres

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Emma stared at the ceiling of the hotel room. Her thoughts went over every memorial, each picture, the families and children left behind. At this point it was a nightly routine. Some people counted sheep. Emma counted her father’s victims. One by one.

~ Anais Torres

You married into the family. You have to love me. It's a contractual obligation.

~ Julia Quinn

I tried to teach them [his sons] that about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.

~ Bill Walton

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensational.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I've had an amazing life. One filled with blessings I could never have imagined.Depressed is the last thing I am. Realistic, yes. Sad, never.

~ Viola Shipman

Perhaps I am a rose-picker and a breeze-sniffer.

~ Sam Wazan

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.

~ Anthony Marra

Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Albie might have been naive or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologized. You said you were embarassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloddy bastard arms-dealers against your son - our son - and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That's just how it is.

~ David Nicholls

You're my daughter. I don't care about the factions.

~ Veronica Roth

The best transactions in families or between friends occur on the fly. They come as stochastic shocks, or serendipities. People often step out onto our path as we are hurrying to a meeting or intent on finishing a project, and it usually turns out that the meeting or the project was inconsequential compared to the chance to get closer to someone we cared for.

~ Alan Loy Mcginnis

It was about having a box in the attic or basement or attic or garage, something we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us, this is where we were last year, and this is where we'll stay, and this is where we'll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it's blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can't name because it's so new.

~ Carrie Brownstein

The most wonderful part of life is when your family becomes your friends, and your friends become your family.

~ Bernard Dsa

The hardest thing about talking to teenagers, I had discovered, was that whatever you said inevitably came across like something an elderly aunt would say at a wedding.

~ Jojo Moyes

For a second, I see into the future: she's old and grey, she has senile dementia and can't remember my name. The thought pretty much breaks my heart in two.

~ Liz Kessler

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each.Nearly 300 watchtowers.Over 250 dog runs.Twenty bunkers.Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.Over 11,000 armed guards.A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.96 miles of concrete wall.Not your typical holiday destination.JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this—among other—notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it.

~ Joanna Campbell

Dad was the glue to the broken pieces of our family.

~ Joanie Chevalier

Families, by and large, like most groups, resist change. If one member of a family wants to move away, this is regarded as a betrayal, for example. If one member of a family is fat and tries to lose weight, often other members of the family will sabotage the effort. If one member of the family wants to get out of a role he or she has been playing for years, this is usually difficult ot do because the rest of the family tries not to let it happen. If your role is clown, you remain the clown. If your role is responsible oldest child, you probably keep that role within your family for your entire life. If you are the black sheep, you'll find it very diffcult to change colors in the eyes of your family no matter how many good deeds you do.

~ Edward M. Hallowell

They had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes’ conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality.

~ Harper Lee

Mama covered her ears with her hands, but I knew she heard me. Tears streamed from her eyes and dribbled from her chin. Part of me wanted to blot her face with a tissue, real tender-like, but the evil me, the girl tired of keeping her feelings bottled up for fear I'd upset mama, was blissful at causing a commotion. Maybe it was cruel to make mama cry, but at least I had cracked her shell and got a reaction. Any response was better than talking to a zombie

~ April Young Fritz