Family Quotes

Here's to real heroes, not the ones who carry us off into the sunset but the ones who help us choose our princes. - commentary on Castles on the Sand

~ E.m. Tippetts

If there's a more helpless feeling than trying to reach someone you love who's trapped underground, I don't know it.

~ Suzanne Collins

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

~ Gabrielle Hamilton

You have to make your own family, your own life.

~ Francesca Lia Block

She raised her sad blue eyes to mine. It's going to be so boring here without you. And I'm going to have to deal with Grandmother on my own! You need to e-mail, text, call, send smoke signals--whatever--and tell me everything you're doing.I laughed. Yes, I know. Every day. I promise.

~ Shannon Greenland

Ain't nothing more important than loving your mama. Even if you can't understand her. Love her. That's all you gotta do.

~ Julie Cantrell

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

~ Francesca Lia Block

We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed each another and made us one. Simple as that.

~ Cynthia Rylant

The passive and overt violence waged against the women and children of the world must end.

~ Bryant Mcgill

We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.

~ Marilynne Robinson

There is no such thing as a normal family so don't trip off it, just deal with it.

~ Ice-T

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.

~ Alexandra Fuller

He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.

~ Edith Pargeter

It doesn't matter what story we're telling, we're telling the story of family.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.

~ Helen Brown

Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.

~ Joseph Heller

One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

~ Patricia Highsmith

The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.

~ John Medina

The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family --- that's the always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.

~ Daniel Woodrell

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

~ George Bernard Shaw

My father is an apparition, and my mother is semiconscious.

~ Jessica Warman

Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.

~ Abdulrazak Gurnah

It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents' lives before I was born.

~ Robert Drewe

Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.

~ Dee Hock

Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.

~ Russell D. Moore

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

Our meeting was inevitable. Our love was terminal. But God and Goddess damn it, our daughter was no mistake at all.

~ Edward Morris

Family is what works.

~ Ian Mcdonald

In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.''Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence. My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.''Do you know what you're saying?'My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?It was obvious to everyone. ~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack

~ ;Alice Sebold

[Phoebe Broome] 'Well,' she said at last. 'You've now met my father. At his worst.'[Lord Vladimir] 'Being myself widely considered my family's most difficult member, I would not presume to comment.''That is... gentlemanly of you.

~ Alison Sinclair

Jeff Hudson started me on a path that was key, and as life goes on it's become a mantra to me. It's that you're born into a family, your family of origin, and you're stuck with it. Once I recognized that, it freed me up to have a different kind of family: a family of choice. The people I surround myself with, spend holidays with, look to for support and comfort and validation -- that's my family of choice.

~ Bob Mould

Nona was as wacky as they came.

~ Holly Hood

Gran follows recipes by looking at picture—to the eye, delicious; to the tongue, boiled socks. Makes you wanna cry really.

~ Simon Cheshire

There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

~ Karen Russell

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.

~ David Mitchell

The number of family secrets is just staggering.

~ Jill A. Davis

On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

~ Peter Høeg

….two slate-colored gravestones settled at a slant into the lower corner of the field beside the lane. She could not read the names engraved on them, but she knew what they were. Joseph Watson, 1820-1891, and James Watson, son of Joseph and Hannah Watson, 1844-1863. The grave of Hannah Watson lay beside her husband’s and because she had died last, she had no marker, unless the pine tree growing there might count as one. To-morrow two men would drive up and leave a basket of flowers and a flag for Joseph because he had fought in the Civil War, and for James because he had died on his way home from it, but they would not have anything for Hannah because she had only identified her son James one hot summer day on the platform of North Derwich Station, and raised all the food her husband ate for twenty years as he sat in a chair in her kitchen, and done washings for Mrs. Hale to buy monuments for them at the end. But the flowers would die in the boxes; even if Jen found time to go down and set out the pansy plants in the ground, stray cows were sure to eat them off before the summer was over; and the Forrest children would take the flags to play with. Nothing would interfere with the tree.

~ Gladys Hasty Carroll

Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).

~ Christopher Hitchens