Family Quotes

Myriam and I are both hard workers, and together we make a strong team. We found ways to make a living, educate our children, and to take care of my parents until their last days, and we managed to have fun doing it. ...The friendships we made along the way were the biggest treasure of all.

~ Marc Ashton

He was the oldest. When we left Kentucky, our folks told him to look after me. Didn't say a word to me. Wouldn't have occurred to them.

~ Micheal Punke

I remember our childhood dayswhen life was easyand math problems hard.Mom would help us with our homeworkand dad was not at home but at work.After our chores, we’d go to the old fort museum with clips in our hair and pure joy in our hearts.You, sister, wore the bangles thatyou, brother, got as a prize from the Dentist.“Why the bangles?” the Dentist asked, surprised, for boys picked the stickers of cars instead.“They’re for my sisters,” you said.Mom would treat us to a bottle of Coke,a few sips each. Then,we’d buy the sweet smelling bread from the same white vanand hand-in-hand,we’d walk to our small flat above the restaurant.I remember our childhood days.Do you remember them too?

~ Kamand Kojouri

I know my sister like I know my own mind, you will never find anyone as trusting or as kind.

~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society’s margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility—look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter.

~ S. Bear Bergman

Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn’t matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families—be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals—and that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.

~ Maggie Nelson

I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also—I am so gratified to report—they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well.

~ S. Bear Bergman

One person can only lose so much before he starts to realize that he's not strong enough to lose any more.

~ Ellie Wade

Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a nuclear family: it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise--it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.

~ Lavie Tidhar

From both my families, I've learnt important things.From my family of chance, I learnt what it was like to be alone and unrecognized, to be perceived through the prism of delusion, a lost soul marooned in the belly of bedlam. I learned the beauty and power of language, but also its capacity for subtle perfidy, how it can be used to subvert and distort reality, to sanction cruelty and sugarcoat abuse. I learned that words can be the path to freedom or just another lock on the caged door.And from my family of choice, I learn on a daily basis about love and loyalty, about burdens shared and intimacies treasured, about forgiveness and atonement and joy. I learn about the gift of a difficult childhood and the fact that ''it's never too late to have a happy one.

~ Lucy Taylor

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

~ Azar Nafisi

Although every person makes mistakes, not every mistake makes a person.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I don´t know anyone who has a perfect family to start with. And I think that´s why we make up our own. regular weirdos together. I feel that way about my friends.

~ Ava Dellaira

You and Sven and Sven. You're my family. I like you and you like me and we all helped each other back there. So isn't that family?

~ Elizabeth Rudnick

When family really needed you, nothing else mattered.

~ Shannon Stacey

My world got very small, the way it always does when someone in your family is sick.

~ Anita Diamant

If you sent speaking pages, they would be like a brother to me.

~ Radegund Of Poitiers

My father looks at me the way he is looking at my mother in one of their wedding pictures: like he can't believe that she is with him now and will be with him forever, that she has chosen to be with him out of all the men in the known world.

~ Francisco X. Stork

1. “Someday there will be a woman-one who takes your breath away. You won’t be afraid of commitment, you’ll be afraid of living without her. That’s when you’ll know. She'll be your reason to exist. You’ll want to move heaven and earth to make her happy and see her smiling face. God help you then. He’s the only one who can.

~ Liv Morris

She opens the book. Each sheet has one or two antique photographs stuck with corner tabs. The images are neither black and white nor gray, but hold that brownish gold of time and exposure to air.This man is your great grandfather. Look at that face, Pedro. It is a mean mean face. He's standing in front of a wood pile, holding an axe. I think he was only a teenager there, a long time before he met my mother. But look how handsome he was. And how mean.It's funny the way she smiles when she talks about him. Saying he's mean has a perverse joy for her, as if she can stick her tongue out at him and his hands are tied so he can't slap her for doing it. She's right, though. There's no lingering smile, no potential for mirth in the burlap of his skin. I notice snow on the ground at his feet, but he's wearing a thin, unbuttoned shirt, showing no sign of cold.

~ Laurie Perez

It was bittersweet and lovely how this thing called family could make you feel belonged, wanted and complete.

~ Diyar Harraz

Just not a big fan of dogmatic rituals or gatherings. Like I put faith in god, I give a truckload of significance to karma, character and compassion.

~ Varsha Dixit

it is strangehowsisterscanbesaviorsorstrangers& sometimesa bit of both.

~ Amanda Lovelace

So I fight for a Father who I never loved, against a brother that I did. I defend an empire that never wanted me against an army that would have taken me in a heartbeat.

~ Chris Wraight

At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

~ Hermann Hesse

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.

~ Félix Guattari

That was the thing about weddings: they forced family members to deal with one another, like it or not.

~ Jamie Brenner

The first time you see your grown-up little miss looking back at you from a sea of white chiffon or beaded satin glory, indeed your heart will skip a beat. You’ll find yourself blinking back tears. That elusive someday has suddenly become now. Your little girl—your jewel—is going to be a bride.

~ Cheryl Barker

My tattoos, like most people's, were reminders, badges of personal experiences. Yes, I might wear them on my skin for the world to see, but their meaning was a little too personal.

~ N.r. Walker

You want a happy family?I'd love a miserable one where everyone hated each other.Why?So we could find redemption in each other's arms.

~ Peter Tieryas

Let go of your daughter with grace and you'll find her calling on you with joy.

~ Cheryl Barker

You’ve spent her whole life holding her. Whether cradled in your arms as a baby or wrapped in your embrace as a young woman, she’s been yours to have and to hold, Mother of the Bride—until now. Now the time has come to let her go, to let herbegin her own family and pledge her allegiance to another.

~ Cheryl Barker

I love my family so much that it brings tears to my eyes.

~ Diana Jaber

Everyone in my family always spares one another's feelings. It leaves little room for honesty.

~ Sara Farizan

My father would laugh behind my back to other family members whenever he heard I was doing something knew. “He wrote a book, what does he know about writing a book? What school did he go to, to be writing a book?” While he laughed and asked about my credentials, I to laughed because what someone would go to school for, I could simply go on YouTube, search the web or simply read a book from someone who’s done it before me.

~ James Jean-Pierre

There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics--bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills.

~ Joanna Walsh

All families had started off in some mysterious waay: to repopulate the earth, or by accident, or by force, or out of boredom; and it's all a mystery what each will become.

~ Yuri Herrera