Family Quotes

The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.

~ Drexel Deal

The groups in different areas that were affiliated with us knew one thing for sure, and that is that they could trust and respect the base. When you look at it, people want to know they have someone in their corner for the worst. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

~ Drexel Deal

Friday night's alright for fightingSaturday, Sunday, Monday tooEvery night is a night of fightingWith family and friends like you

~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance.

~ Carrie Brownstein

As we gather around the rough-hewn farm table made by my grandfather, I am reminded that my family has come together for generations in this same way. Summers were always our favorite times; we would eat outdoors under the shade of a tree - hand-rolled pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden, cheese from my Aunt Carmella, olive oil sent by our cousin in Santa Margherita, and wine from our own jugs. After having our fill of food and laughter, we'd pluck ripe figs right off the trees, peel and eat them until the sun disappeared into the blue. I can still taste those summer days, and will always do everything in my power to re-create them.

~ Adriana Trigiani

We the caregivers, have the power to do things proactively to benefit our present and future generations.

~ Betsy L. Stone

Families come into therapy with their own structure, and tone, and rules. Their organization, their pattern, has been established over years of living, and it is extremely meaningful and very painful for them. They would not be in therapy if they were happy with it. But however faulty, the family counts on the familiarity and predictability of their world. If they are going to turn loose this painful predictability and attempt to reorganize themselves, they need firm external support. The family crucible must has a shape, a form, a discipline of sorts, and the therapist has to provide it. The family has to know whether we can provide it, and so they test us.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial authority figure or parent role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Remember, there are people who care for us: there are some who grow food for us, some who cook for us, some who take our trash out, some who keep us safe, some who call us late at night when it’s been a tough day and some who are right by our side the next morning when we are sick, some who smile at us, some who hold the door for us, some who compliment us, who back us, who pray for us. And, they can be friends and family and mentors and relatives and sometimes, in fact, most of the times, even perfect strangers. Let’s be grateful to each one of them, let’s be grateful to all those around us.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Scientist say that music can change the speed of a heartbeat. They failed to add: so can a text message.

~ Holly Smale

That which you love most will then become both your strength and your weakness.

~ Criss Jami

Family does not mean people with the same last name or the same DNA. It means people who care about you, who you trust, who you care about--people you can count on.

~ Kris Radish

Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.

~ Samuel Butler

It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch

I don’t know why—it’s just that—I don’t know—they’re not kin.—Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin—sounds like hillbilly talk—not of a kind—same root—kindness, too—they can’t have real kindness toward him, they’re not his kin -- . That’s exactly the feeling. Old word, so ancient it’s almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be kind. And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Hang in. We’ll make it. We all have each other.

~ Danielle Steel

Family! So sorry, forgive me. I thought I'd met all the mispocheh!

~ Nicole Krauss

It's all a game. And if you don't want to play, maybe you shouldn't come to Hollywood.

~ Sophie Kinsella

Because that's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block everything we can't.

~ Holly Smale

You should always say goodbye to the people you love before you walk away. Hug them and hold them tight like it is the last moment you have, because it just might be.

~ Jenna Alatari

When your family dismisses you, like Lotto's did, you create your own family

~ Lauren Groff

Even though we were still waiting for Don, therapy was well begun. We were engaged in a subtle, often predictable, and very important contest with the family about who was going to be present at the meetings. Carl and I had revealed some of what our relationship had to offer: a good-humored liking for each other, an ability to cooperate, and an insistence on remaining ourselves. I was clearly not going to be the reverential assistant to the older man. And perhaps most important, Carl had intuitively modeled some of the process of therapy for the family. By sharing insight into his own personality, he was saying by demonstration, It's important to search for you own unconscious agenda.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don?They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

Bond is stronger than blood. The family grows stronger by bond.

~ Itohan Eghide

Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one person saying to another person: You are the one I choose.

~ Tania De Rozario

The Lord gives a good many things twice over, but he don't give ye a mother but once.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.

~ Ruta Sepetys

The open forgiveness in her eyes, the uncensored love, terrified me.

~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh

You must know this. People disappear. They just go puff. Thin air. Every time you see someone, you never know if you're seeing them for the last time. Drink them in, Alec. Kiss them. It's very important. Never let anyone say goodbye, even for a little while, without kissing them. Press your lips against the people you love. Hands, they can touch anything. Open doors, hold cameras, hang clothes on the line. It's lips that matter.

~ Toni Jordan

I didn't give you this life, honey. They took to you because of who you are. You gave yourself this life.

~ David Isay

Sometimes the greatest storms bring out the greatest beauty… Life can be a storm, but your hope is a rainbow and your friends and family are the gold.

~ Steve Maraboli

I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

~ Mitch Albom

He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you.

~ Sheldon Lee Compton

Nothing you could do would make me send you away. Nothing.

~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh

It's sad when you realize that people you've loved (whether friends, family, or loved ones) are going down paths you know you can't take. It's especially sad when you realize that it's because you don't want to take it, because you two are too different. It's sad when people who used to energize you with their presence, now only drain you with their mere words.

~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.

~ Dan Price

More and more these days, I'm realizing that I might be crazy, but I'm loved too. I don't think I ever really knew that before, but I do now.

~ Bill Konigsberg

Suddenly, in my mind I hear my father say, 'Mind over matter, son. You can do this. You can accomplish anything as long as you really want to.

~ Marc Ashton