Family Quotes

Rod Cockshutt, Professor Emeritus at N.C. State University called my book, Evidence of Insanity, an extraordinary achievement and told me to not change the last 10-15 pages no matter what.

~ Carol Piner

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

~ Margaret Atwood

We all have days when we say that we are gown-ups, that we are mature, have a lot of experience and don't need advise from others.But it is our mom and dad we turn to when we're in trouble or can't find the answer to a question.

~ Maurice J. Dubois

Most people made comments on how I was the strongest woman they knew.That was before the title wave of disaster hit my charmed life.

~ K.d. Emerson

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Do you like my brother? And there goes Dan's confidence. He keeps his eyes resolutely on the field. Uh... yes? I mean... I think everyone likes your brother, don't they? She leans over and gives him a little hip check. No, you know what I mean. Do you /like/ him? Dan just states out at the horses, hoping that one of them will do something, anything, to distract this girl from her question. But the horses just keep grazing and Tat continues. 'Cause he likes you. I mean, he likes Jeff, too, but... you can like two people at once, right? Uh... yes? I think you can like two people at once. Yeah. I know it's none of my business or whatever, but... I just wanted to make sure you know... if you like him, that's cool with me. I mean, I like Jeff too, but... you know. Dan has a brief moment of wanting to shake her. No, he /doesn't/ know. Is everything really so clear to everyone but him? Is he just adding extra complications where they don't need to be? Then he remembers that he's talking to a fifteen-year-old girl. Maybe she shouldn't be the arbiter of what's simple or complicated. He realizes that she's still waiting for a response from him. Okay, well... thanks for letting me know. Are you guys going to, like... date?Sweet Jesus, Tat, I don't know! Possibly that's a bit of an overreaction, but she looks more amused than upset. All right, all right.... She gets a mischievous look in her eyes.

~ Kate Sherwood

You can never please everybody, don't even try.

~ Stella Oladiran

When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito's birth changed all that.

~ Diogo Mainardi

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

~ Chaim Potok

Let us live not only to serve God ourselves, let us live to help our children and their children live for God.

~ Dillon Burroughs

The primary purpose of a home is to reflect and to distribute the love of Christ. Anything that usurps that is idolatrous.

~ Ravi Zacharias

My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.I know this is troubling.I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns.Chimps. There's no excuse for them.

~ Katherine Applegate

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.

~ Justin Torres

It struck me that the beauty we attribute to children isn’t something they have that we don’t. It's something they do, which we have long since stopped doing—just describing things as we see them, the simple, unadorned facts.

~ Christina Carson

My life has been like a battlefield, a war that could never be won unless I had her with me, and the day she died my battlefront stepped down and threw away their shields, allowing the gunshots to slip through the second her heart stopped beating. From that moment onwards I was left wounded, and for those seventeen years without her my wounds bled-wounds no stitch could ever repair.

~ Rebecah Mcmanus

Sometimes we control our family members because we idolize and idealize our perfect plan over the journey that God has laid out for them. (p. 56)

~ Mary E. Demuth

All men were tools, as she saw it. Dangerous tools, when roused, but that was why one took care in efforts of control. It all came back to leverage. It wasn’t enough to ask a man if he would kill his brother. One had to make him see the consequences if he did not. Then one could only ask, which would he choose: brother or daughter? For all that kin might mean, most would choose the daughter.

~ Chris Galford

In the school of success, information is the greatest asset. The more you read, the more you discover, the more you discover, the more you recover and the better your life become.

~ Stella Oladiran

I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was productive. Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.

~ Gretchen Rubin

In general, the more dysfunctional the family the more inappropriate their response to disclosure. Never expect a sane response from an insane system.

~ Renee Fredrickson

I came to this house for safety. They came because the foster care system ran out of homes. We stayed because we were stray pieces of other puzzles, tired of never fitting.

~ Katie Mcgarry

In my family, you can rot to hell on the inside as long as you’re flawless on the outside, which is really sick, but also hard to unlearn.

~ Laura Wiess

I'm not the boss of my house. I don't know how I lost it, I don't know when I lost it, I don't really think I ever had it. But I've seen the boss's job...and I don't want it!

~ Bill Cosby

We have a mental health system that is dominated by political and hidden forces that keep us stagnated and unable to see real, lasting change.

~ Tamara Hill

What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears, gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own.

~ Mira Bartok

And Kate thought about a time, long ago, when she had witnessed an ongoing romance between two mental patients. As a teenager watching their unlikely relationship unfold in front of her, she had understood that people did whatever they needed to do to be happy, regardless of their unfortunate circumstances. She supposed her mother’s day care center was born out of the desire to feel needed, while making use of the skills that were practically all she had managed to acquire during decades of battling a debilitating illness.

~ Sabrynne Mclain

I lost my family,” he says softly. The tone of his voice justifies my earlier regret. “If you have nothing to love, you have nothing to lose. Even your own life becomes meaningless.

~ Celia Mcmahon

Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you’ll eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love.

~ Tom Burns

It made a big difference in my life to grow up with a dad who wasn't afraid of how great my mom was.

~ Steve Maraboli

At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.

~ Tim Kreider

My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother, she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps that a cat. As a result, I've always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me.

~ Chelsea Handler

exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.

~ David Levithan

He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.

~ Rohinton Mistry

An aunt is a safe haven for a child. Someone who will keep your secrets and is always on your side.

~ Sara Sheridan

His shirt is rumpled. His fingers, long and slender, are stained yellow at the tips from smoking. His mind is always on something else. My mind is busy, too, reading every cue and signal, keeping track of all the things that cannot be discussed, that must not be remembered, that have to be erased.

~ Kristen Iversen

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.

~ David Sedaris

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

~ Kelly Corrigan

A mother's love, it knows no end. It begins with a dream, with a silent wish, and it never ever ends.

~ Kelly Debie

I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?

~ Rebecca Solnit

Toys have taken over my family room. I watch Mary Poppins, and no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar I eat, action figures won’t march into a bin with the snap of my fingers.

~ Barbara Brooke