Family Quotes

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

~ Gregory Maguire

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

~ George Orwell

I think that is the very definition of a family: a group of individuals, bound by the essence of love, who share a life together and yet maintain their unique individuality.

~ Kathy Magliato

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. Douglas MacArthur

~ Terri Marie

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful

~ Douglas Coupland

How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

~ Jandy Nelson

Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.

~ Frederick Douglass

I am convinced that we as adults must constantly cling to, affirm, and celebrate with our children those things we love, sunsets, laughter, the taste of a good meal, the warmth of a hickory fire shared by real friends, the joy of discovery and accomplishment, the constant surprises of life.

~ Eliot Wigginton

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.

~ Orhan Pamuk

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

~ Wendell Berry

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

~ Nicole Krauss

Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. (The Higgler)

~ A.e. Coppard

Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.

~ Bell Hooks

The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.

~ Mitch Albom

Granma's name was Bonnie Bee. I knew that when I heard him late at night say, 'I kin ye, Bonnie Bee,' he was saying, 'I love ye,' for the feeling was in the words.

~ Forrest Carter

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

~ Lauren Willig

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)

~ A.e. Coppard

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…

~ John Burnside

The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me.

~ Heather O'neill

When dancing with a pit bull, it's always best to let him lead.

~ Michael Barnett

Will you be all right? she askedHow could

~ Carol Matas

The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

If you never learned to hold onto someone, how could it possibly hurt now to let them go?

~ Shannon L. Alder

Some families are an odd melting pot of strangers with the occasional offering of obligation.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.

~ Francisco X. Alarcón

And in that moment, Grace understood something that she would never forget: Home wasn't just a building or an apartment with a roof and beds and chairs inside. Home was with her family, wherever they were.

~ Priscilla Cummings

Following her instructions, I joined her in the chopping and mixing. The magical smell of pickling spices wound around us and it wasn't long before we were in another world. I was suddenly immersed in the hand-written recipes Mother resurrected from the back of the Hoosier cabinet--in the cheesecloth filled with mustard seed and pungent dill. As we followed the recipes her mother had followed and her mother before that, we talked--as the afternoon wore on I was listening to preserve the stories in my mind. 'I can remember watching my grandmother and mother rushing around this same old kitchen, putting up all kinds of vegetables--their own hand-sown, hand-picked crops--for the winter. My grandmother would tell her stories about growing up right here, on this piece of land--some were hilarious and some were tragic.' Pots still steamed on the stove, but Mother's attention seemed directed backwards as she began to speak about the past. She spoke with a slow cadence, a rhythm punctuated (or maybe inspired) by the natural symphony around us.

~ Leslie Goetsch

Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words ‘to father’ have such a different meaning from the words ‘to mother’.

~ Claire Fuller

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral.

~ Damien Echols

Church and family are both primary influences designed by God for a purpose and when they work together, they are orange. Both are systems comprised of imperfect people—that’s why God desires to use them as a platform to tell his story of restoration and redemption to the world.

~ Reggie Joiner

As parents, we have the responsibility and the power to create a foundational love for nutritious foods that will influence our children's choices for decades to come, setting the stage for our children, grandchildren, and future generations to flourish in wellness and health.

~ Leah Borski

In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change.

~ Thomas M. Disch

I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

~ Scott Spencer

Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right way? We have to go with our inner instincts and the feeling in our bones. But I can contribute to their growing cells, show them some foods that are better than others, walk with them, and encourage their own tastes. I can teach them to love and appreciate food, help them treat their bodies like gold, listen to them wanting more or less. The rest I have to trust.

~ Tessa Kiros

Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same.

~ David Wroblewski

He crouched at the care window and looked in. What a lovely family you have. What a charming family. They're all lovely. Except for that one. His finger jabbed the glass. That one's a bit ugly.The American stepped towards him. What? What did you say?Oh, don't worry. I'm sure his personality makes up for his face.

~ Derek Landy

Having a little girl has been like following an old treasure map with the important paths torn away.

~ Heather Gudenkauf