Family Quotes - Page 48

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;

Pray regularly for the members of your family.

It’s one thing to have a support system in your lifeto cheer you on during the instances wheneveryone is rooting for you. However, it’s anotherthing entirely to look back in your darkestmoments and still see them standing in yourcorner, encouraging you to stay in the ring andFIGHT, when the odds aren’t in your favor and allyou want to do is throw in the towel.Not many people in this life will be on your sideeven when they aren’t on your side. Even less whomomentarily will slam doors out of frustration butnever actually lock you out.Unconditional love; the definition of sister.

A man’s weakness is his family and a woman’s is her child

Life is full of intriguing souls that you cannot penetrate… An uncomfortable percentage of those anguished and impregnable souls also have suffering hearts that are further tormented by a deluded mind. They will hurt out of an impulse, and then live their lives after that without the slightest remorse.

That's how birthdays were in our house. All hateful charades of pretty clothes, expensive presents, and ugly words . . .

Relationships formed through Jiu Jitsu are deeply rooted in respect for one another, and this is often not the case in matters of modern society.

With so much trauma and drama in everyday life, the beauty of peace and solitude beckons like an oasis in a barren wasteland.

I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.

Don't worry that you're being pathetic when you try not to get caught stealing a kiss from your spouse, or when you pray for a time when the kids are out of the house so you can make out on the couch, or when you consider a trip with your husband to the lawn-care section of Home Depot a hot date.No. You're not pathetic. You're in a blended family....

We had been two sides of the same coin, attached by a force stronger than family or friends. We had been one.

The greatest gift at Christmas is love. The love that bind us together us one Human Family.

And suddenly I know I have to go. But this time without being chased by the Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breath for the rest of my life.

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.

She had to go," said Rose."It was because of her angel," said Indigo."And because of Granddad," added Caddy."And because of her nose stud.""And because her name isn't on the color chart.""She's lonely," said Rose. "That's why.

AMELIA: To my daughter, if you ever date anyone like the men I write, I will kick your *ss up between your ears and you will walk sideways for a month, but I’ll still love you.

Do as you must -- you are not a child. But understand that there are many people willing to make your life more difficult. It is up to you to find a way to make things easier for yourself.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child.

Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself.I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?

If we are wonderful parents and family members, then there’s really nothing else to prove.

When someone obtains peace and serenity, this shines a bright spotlight on others’ own unhappiness making their discomfort even more apparent.

You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,' my dad said. 'Like you have left your heart behind.'He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind maybe.'What nonsense, his heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,' my mother said.'Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.' My dad never said my mother's name; she was always Begum, the generic term for 'wife'.

Without love, life was nothing but endless tasks and battles.

(Patrick Henry) He understood that the home was the foundation of a stable society and that the authority a man "exercised within the larger society was rooted in the authority exercised at home." Thus ... the training ground for all sound leadership is the family.

We do not recognize that we are addicted to some negative psychological habit, some terribly self-destructive patterns of thinking...

You know, Dorothy, you can’t let people bring you down so easily or you’ll have your nose in the dirt for the rest of your life. From what I make of it, for every person with a good thought, there are about fifty who’d try to spoil it. We have to guard our good ideas, our happy thoughts, and fight for them. Because if we let those others snuff them out, well, we didn’t after all deserve them.

I looked into her eyes, and saw my own staring back, the same peculiar shade, pale grey, flecked with yellow, rimmed with black. Now I knew the nature of her debt. It had weighed on her conscience for fourteen years. I was looking into the eyes of mother and I knew that I would never see her again.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.

I write to get ideas out of my head

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.

Family comes in many shapes and forms. It’s a single mom that happily gives up the things she wants or needs in order to provide that extra special something for her child. It’s the single father that’s trying to be a mother and father to his kids. It’s the parents that were never able to have children of their own and adopt a child. Family doesn’t show prejudice based on race, age or sex. Family isn’t only defined by blood; it’s defined by love. Something that Lily and I have in leaps and bounds. Family's what we make it, what we want it to be.

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization.

We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever

A young nurse, someone new whom he didn't recognise, came up to Henry and patted him on the arm. "Are you a friend or a family member?" She whispered the question in his ear, trying not to disturb Sheldon. The question hung there like a beautiful chord, ringing in the air. Henry was Chinese, Sheldon obviously wasn't. They looked nothing alike. Nothing at all. "I'm distant family," Henry said.

A family is like medicine." She twisted her lips into a sardonic smile. "Best in small doses.

The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

Rory, I want to say that death is what you've always wanted. But that can't be the Truth. [This time] we can blame it on me. I'll be the packing mule, carry all the burden. & you, you can be a child again; fold your church hands like dirty laundry [crease them tight]. Nobody has to know about us, not my fathernor yours --No, not even God

Sometimes the bridges you burn light the way out of your darkness, but the memory of the blaze will be burned into your heart and mind forever.

I believe that we are always attracted to what we need most an instinct leading us towards the persons who are to open new vistas in our lives and fill them with new knowledge.

And now I am sitting in the graveyard, staring at two headstones, and feeling good and bad at the same time. The way we do when our own lives continue to unfold, but the lives that gave us life and others that gave our lives meaning have ended.

Daniel first kisses his brother in a town where no-one knows them, a no-account place that's barely even a town, just some buildings clustered around the highway: a smoky bar, an empty motel, a convenience store that only sells candy and condoms and beer. The nearest gas station is twenty miles away. The nearest bus station is fifty.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

It seems to me, that you people spend a great deal of time talking about honour, but strip away the high sounding words and you are no different from any other race. Family? Has Priam not killed wayward sons? When a king dies do his sons not go to war with one another to succeed him? Men speak of how you reacted to your father's death. They say it was amazing, for you did not order your little brother's execution. Your race thrives on blood and death, Helikaon. Your ships raid the coasts of other nations, stealing slaves, burning and plundering. Warriors brag of how many men they have killed, and women they have raped. Almost all of your kings either seized their thrones with swords and murder, or are children of men who seized power with swords and murder. So put all this talk of honour to one side.

Once people knew about the cancer, I wouldn't be able to stop them from talking about Val every time they saw me. And then I would stop being me, because my time was something I could only buy at home.

You are nothing like my father. And like my father you are nothing.

I love being a great-grandparent but what I hate is being the the mother of a grandparent.

I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out.

If we wish to have a beautiful, peaceful and safe home, we need healthy expanding roots that go deep into the ground. These roots are our Routine, our Stability, our Structure.

That morning all of us girls had put our hair in high vintage-like ponytails, and Aunt Julie joked that we could almost be triplets. I laughed but knew that since my hair was so straight no one would ever confuse Rose and I.

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.

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.

...only the dreamers of a dream are capable of translating their dreams into worthy practical endeavors that are devoid of haunting errors. After all, they are the ones who carefully observed the link between their dreams and reality; they are the ones who worked consciously to blend them into one.

Family tragedies had a way of smashing everything apart and then gluing it all back together. The problem was no one ever knew how long the glue would hold.

It is impossible to enjoy divine protection without the word of God. You must be a word addict.

The best story to tell your kids is that of your own family.

The stronger the family, stronger the society.

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.