c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In an extended family, anybody can bug out of his own house for months, and still be among relatives. Nobody has to go on a hopeless quest for friendly strangers, which is what most Americans have to do.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Dr. Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man's medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked had, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient's home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my mother and his wife and asked them to guess what was inside the package. My mother's eyes was glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out "Steamed rolls!" she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr. Xia's twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she can remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Insanity runs in my family, but somehow we've always managed to track it down and catch it again.
— Pamela Morris
What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved
— Friedrich Nietzsche
She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.
— Patrick White, The Tree Of Man
Social values, friends, communities and families control our thoughts.
— Balroop Singh
I believe when i was born, i did not choose my family. but i also believe they are special gift of God for me so let's be kind, be honest and love them unconditionally, i also know in every family there are or there will some problems happen which the members of the family stop communicating with each but let's remember that pure love among the family member will be always there, Let's love our family, be honest and respect them and try to do our best to put smile on their face but not by hurting others.
— Arash Tabish
I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned me in a strange place & I had to find my way back home-I thought I could do it blind, the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back to where it belonged.
— Laura McHugh, Arrowood
Something like another wave of despair crashes into me. "I'm so heavy." I blink and a tear slides down my cheek."Then you lean on us for a while. Let us carry you, Joy, until you're not heavy anymore. That's what family is.
— Jolene Perry
This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can't chew your way out of.
— Lauren Beukes, Moxyland
We've had our ups and downs since then, but that's what families have, ups and downs.
— Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask
The key to happiness is under the doorstep rug.
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
Early violence and early abandonment damages people and family systems, and can persist for decades if not healed.
— Christine Mason
Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. “You should’ve told us,” they’d say. “We would’ve helped you.” You’re not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you’re not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven’t starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
BEWARE DON'T RUN AFTER A MIRAGEWe were happier when we were poor. We were happier when we did not have good food to eat or good clothes to wear. We were happier when we did not have a luxurious life. We were happier when we did not have our own house because we had a home, a family and understood, loved and lived for each other. I have failed to understand what we run after even when we have all.
— Amit Abraham
It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
They all looked at her with tears in their eyes and gratitude on their faces, for she had made them see that they should not fight each other, but that family is the one thing that was worth fighting for.
— Mina Marial Nicoli, The Magic of Avalon Eyrelin
a daughter shouldnot have to beg her fatherfor a relationship
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
...we're not eighteen anymore. We've lived. We've created things that last – things of joy, and things of burden.
— Dianna Hardy, Summer's End
I held out the rune for Hearthstone. ‘I know what it feels like to be an empty cup, to have everything taken away from you. But you’re not alone. However much magic you need to use, it’s okay. We’ve got you. We’re your family.’Hearth’s eyes rimmed with green water. He signed to us, and this time I think he actually meant I love you and not the giantesses are drunk.He took the rune and set it between the prongs of his new staff. The stone snapped into place the same way my pendant did on its chain. The symbol perthro glowed with a gentle gold light.My sign, he announced. My family’s sign.Blitzen sniffled. ‘I like that. A family of four empty cups!’Sam wiped her eyes. ‘Suddenly I feel thirsty.’‘Al-Abbas,’ I said, ‘I nominate you for the role of annoying sister.’‘Shut up, Magnus.
— Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer
I held out the rune for Hearthstone. ‘I know what it feels like to be an empty cup, to have everything taken away from you. But you’re not alone. However much magic you need to use, it’s okay. We’ve got you. We’re your family.’Hearth’s eyes rimmed with green water. He signed to us, and this time I think he actually meant 
— Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer
When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.
— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
I held out the rune for Hearthstone. ‘I know what it feels like to be an empty cup, to have everything taken away from you. But you’re not alone. However much magic you need to use, it’s okay. We’ve got you. We’re your family.’Hearth’s eyes rimmed with green water. He signed to us, and this time I think he actually meant 'I love you' and not 'the giantesses are drunk.'He took the rune and set it between the prongs of his new staff. The stone snapped into place the same way my pendant did on its chain. The symbol 
— Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer
Family is not a career. It’s why you have a career. If you can’t be there for the big moments, then why are you doing it?
— Jewel E. Ann, One
It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.
— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.
— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
Death can surprise us. It can scare us. It can keep us up at night. But we’ve also learned the things that death cannot do. It cannot crush our hopes. It cannot take away the love and support of our friends and family.
— John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
Never take your loved ones for granted. You might lose them in a split of second and never got a chance to say good-bye.
— Abdulazeez Henry Musa
She'd brought everybody apart, tearing the whole family that was once a compact groundwork into a whole new design, ugly and non-structured.
— Diyar Harraz, One Minute to Midnight
The family was God's idea, not our own, and it is still a wonderful institution.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.
— Philippa Gregory, The White Queen
Despite their depressing circumstances, the Hernandez family had a certain dignity and strength about them. They were Christians, and they taught their children that God loved them and had a plan for their lives. Their little boy, David, internalized that message of hope. He never thought of himself as a victim even though he had every reason to feel cheated. His family was at the bottom of the social ladder without even a house to live in, but his worth as an individual was rooted in his faith.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
I love my family because they are always there for me even during my fragile moments.
— Gugu Mona
a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjölskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjöl means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjölskyldubönd: "the cords (bönd) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
In my mind, learning to fly was a very logical alternative. I honestly saw no other way to free myself from this torture other than to fly just like the birds did; the birds were completely free"​
— Veronika Gasparyan, Mother at Seven
I am so grateful that I have my family and friends on this journey. They are my blessings! I need them; and just the same, I know they need me too. That is why I have never thought of giving up.
— Kcat Yarza, KCAT CAN: I have a pen that writes
It was mind boggling to know that I would experience such betrayal at such a young age while others live their whole life without knowing what betrayal is
— Veronika Gasparyan, Mother at Seven
Some of the most evil human beings in the world are psychiatrists. Not all psychiatrists. Some psychiatrists are selfless, caring people who really want to help. But the sad truth is that in today's society, mental health isn't a science. It's an industry. Ritalin, Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, Resperidone, happy pills that are supposed to "normalize" the behavior of our families, our colleagues, our friends - tell me that doesn't sound the least bit creepy! Mental health is subjective. To us, a little girl talking to her pretend friends instead of other children might just be harmless playing around. To a psychiatrist, it's a financial opportunity. Automatically, the kid could be swept up in a sea of labels. "not talking to other kids? Okay, she's asocial!" or "imaginary friends? Bingo, she has schizophrenia!" I'm not saying in any way that schizophrenia and social disorders aren't real. But the alarming number of people, especially children, who seem to have these "illnesses" and need to be medicated or locked up... it's horrifying. The psychiatrists get their prestigious reputation and their money to burn. The drug companies get fast cash and a chance to claim that they've discovered a wonder-drug, capable of "curing" anyone who might be a burden on society... that's what it's all about. It's not about really talking to these troubled people and finding out what they need. It's about giving them a pill that fits a pattern, a weapon to normalize people who might make society uncomfortable. The psychiatrists get their weapon. Today's generations get cheated out of their childhoods. The mental health industry takes the world's most vulnerable people and messes with their heads, giving them controlled substances just because they don't fit the normal puzzle. And sadly, it's more or less going to get worse in this rapidly advancing century.
— Rebecca McNutt
The only reason that some people aren’t ashamed of their parents and/or siblings is because they know that we know that they did not choose them.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I came from as low as one could come, with no mother and no father. So in return I build a family for myself and these fella’s were a part of my family. So I had to look out for them, as if I was looking out for my children. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
— Anthony Brandt
It is sometimes hard to be a family.
— Maurice Sendak
I know you don't want to be me. But I'd hate for you to ever feel like you're in my shadow. You're not and you never will be. You are awesome, and there is some kind of amazing future waiting for you.
— Gwenda Bond, Double Down
There is no right way to be a family.
— Betsy L. Stone
We really had a close netted structure to rely on for anything, you could have gone by anyone house and get something to eat. Whatever they were eating, they would’ve fed you, and all the mothers would’ve treated you just like they treated their own. What the gang also did, it provided some level of protection for a lot of the working adults in the neighborhood. They knew that their houses were safe, when they went out to work and didn’t have to worry about anyone breaking in to their homes. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. 	When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
The groups in different areas that were affiliated with us knew one thing for sure, and that is that they could trust and respect the base. When you look at it, people want to know they have someone in their corner for the worst. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
Live a Nomad Family lifestyle to broaden your horizon and create a more suitable lifestyle for your family
— Brenda Brave
Friday night's alright for fightingSaturday, Sunday, Monday tooEvery night is a night of fightingWith family and friends like you
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour, Willow
There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour
I'm sick of the images trapped in my headI'm sick of being preoccupied with the dead
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour
I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance.
— Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
As we gather around the rough-hewn farm table made by my grandfather, I am reminded that my family has come together for generations in this same way. Summers were always our favorite times; we would eat outdoors under the shade of a tree - hand-rolled pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden, cheese from my Aunt Carmella, olive oil sent by our cousin in Santa Margherita, and wine from our own jugs. After having our fill of food and laughter, we'd pluck ripe figs right off the trees, peel and eat them until the sun disappeared into the blue. I can still taste those summer days, and will always do everything in my power to re-create them.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
We the caregivers, have the power to do things proactively to benefit our present and future generations.
— Betsy L. Stone
Families come into therapy with their own structure, and tone, and rules. Their organization, their pattern, has been established over years of living, and it is extremely meaningful and very painful for them. They would not be in therapy if they were happy with it. But however faulty, the family counts on the familiarity and predictability of their world. If they are going to turn loose this painful predictability and attempt to reorganize themselves, they need firm external support. The family crucible must has a shape, a form, a discipline of sorts, and the therapist has to provide it. The family has to know whether we can provide it, and so they test us.
— Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it.
— Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Remember, there are people who care for us: there are some who grow food for us, some who cook for us, some who take our trash out, some who keep us safe, some who call us late at night when it’s been a tough day and some who are right by our side the next morning when we are sick, some who smile at us, some who hold the door for us, some who compliment us, who back us, who pray for us. And, they can be friends and family and mentors and relatives and sometimes, in fact, most of the times, even perfect strangers. Let’s be grateful to each one of them, let’s be grateful to all those around us.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Scientist say that music can change the speed of a heartbeat. They failed to add: so can a text message.
— Holly Smale, Model Misfit
That which you love most will then become both your strength and your weakness.
— Criss Jami
Family does not mean people with the same last name or the same DNA. It means people who care about you, who you trust, who you care about--people you can count on.
— Kris Radish, Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral
Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.
— Samuel Butler
It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
I don’t know why—it’s just that—I don’t know—they’re not kin."—Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin—sounds like hillbilly talk—not of a kind—same root—kindness, too—they can’t have real kindness toward him, they’re not his kin -- . That’s exactly the feeling. Old word, so ancient it’s almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Hang in. We’ll make it. We all have each other.
— Danielle Steel, Friends Forever
The Hills Have EYes... so be careful where you step and where you go so far one family has went there and few of them have came back!
— Deyth Banger
Family! So sorry, forgive me. I thought I'd met all the mispocheh!
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
It's all a game. And if you don't want to play, maybe you shouldn't come to Hollywood.
— Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic to the Stars
Because that's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block everything we can't.
— Holly Smale, Model Misfit
You should always say goodbye to the people you love before you walk away. Hug them and hold them tight like it is the last moment you have, because it just might be.
— Jenna Alatari
When your family dismisses you, like Lotto's did, you create your own family
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Even though we were still waiting for Don, therapy was well begun. We were engaged in a subtle, often predictable, and very important contest with the family about who was going to be present at the meetings. Carl and I had revealed some of what our relationship had to offer: a good-humored liking for each other, an ability to cooperate, and an insistence on remaining ourselves. I was clearly not going to be the reverential assistant to the older man. And perhaps most important, Carl had intuitively modeled some of the process of therapy for the family. By sharing insight into his own personality, he was saying by demonstration, "It's important to search for you own unconscious agenda.
— Augustus Y. Napier
When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don?They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe.
— Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.
— Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
Bond is stronger than blood. The family grows stronger by bond.
— Itohan Eghide, Master of Maxims
Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one person saying to another person: You are the one I choose.
— Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down
The Lord gives a good many things twice over, but he don't give ye a mother but once.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
The open forgiveness in her eyes, the uncensored love, terrified me.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers
You must know this. People disappear. They just go puff. Thin air. Every time you see someone, you never know if you're seeing them for the last time. Drink them in, Alec. Kiss them. It's very important. Never let anyone say goodbye, even for a little while, without kissing them. Press your lips against the people you love. Hands, they can touch anything. Open doors, hold cameras, hang clothes on the line. It's lips that matter.
— Toni Jordan, Nine Days
I didn't give you this life, honey. They took to you because of who you are. You gave yourself this life.
— David Isay, StoryCorps: Outloud
Sometimes the greatest storms bring out the greatest beauty… Life can be a storm, but your hope is a rainbow and your friends and family are the gold.
— Steve Maraboli
I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you.
— Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle
Nothing you could do would make me send you away. Nothing.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers
Everyone thinks his family is strange," Del said, scratching Scootie behind the ears, "but it's just that... because we're closer to the people we love, we tend to see them through a magnifying glass, through a thicker lens of emotion, and we exaggerate their eccentricities.
— Dean Koontz, Tick Tock
It's sad when you realize that people you've loved (whether friends, family, or loved ones) are going down paths you know you can't take. It's especially sad when you realize that it's because you don't want to take it, because you two are too different. It's sad when people who used to energize you with their presence, now only drain you with their mere words.
— Jennifer Megan Varnadore
I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.
— Dan Price
More and more these days, I'm realizing that I might be crazy, but I'm loved too. I don't think I ever really knew that before, but I do now.
— Bill Konigsberg, The Porcupine of Truth
Suddenly, in my mind I hear my father say, 'Mind over matter, son. You can do this. You can accomplish anything as long as you really want to.
— Marc Ashton
A blood line is something you're born into. A Family is something you create.
— Chris Wistaff
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, Hamilton: The Revolution
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, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter
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, The Argonauts
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, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter
The most important people are the once who loved me when i was hardly likable
— Robin Dabhi
One person can only lose so much before he starts to realize that he's not strong enough to lose any more.
— Ellie Wade, Finding London
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, Central Station
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, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
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, Love Letters to the Dead
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, A Frozen Heart
When family really needed you, nothing else mattered.
— Shannon Stacey, Heat Exchange
My world got very small, the way it always does when someone in your family is sick.
— Anita Diamant, The Boston Girl
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, The Memory of Light
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, Marry Screw Kill
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, Torpor: Though the Heart Is Warm
It was bittersweet and lovely how this thing called family could make you feel belonged, wanted and complete.
— Diyar Harraz, Like The Starlings
I don't buy that overused line about a woman's job making her a better mother. The children need more time. Everything in our home needs more time.
— Holly Peterson
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, Only Wheat Not White
it is strangehowsisterscanbesaviorsorstrangers& sometimesa bit of both.
— Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in this One
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, The Path of Heaven
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, Siddhartha
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, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living
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, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living
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 Wedding Sisters
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, Mother of the Bride: Refreshment and Wisdom for the Mother of the Bride
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, Spencer Cohen, Book One
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, United States of Japan
Let go of your daughter with grace and you'll find her calling on you with joy.
— Cheryl Barker, Mother of the Bride: Refreshment and Wisdom for the Mother of the Bride
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, Mother of the Bride: Refreshment and Wisdom for the Mother of the Bride
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, If You Could Be Mine
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, Vertigo
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, Signs Preceding the End of the World
It was a gaze that held the comfort of familiarity. There was no mystery, no enigmatic depth, but unrestrained length, the length of years—the laughter of childhood games and Christmas carols of home— lining its pathways with simple, yet easily overlooked, understanding.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimate the length of a generation, we are only 5,000 to 10,000 generations from one another. To put it another way, each of us is a cousin of one another at most 10,000 times removed. And yes, Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa, so, in a very real way, we are all Africans.
— Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World
Chilled ice tea that tempered tepid summer days lathered thick with humidity. Frothy hot chocolate that cut winter’s chill. Bedtime prayers that sent our fears scrambling in panicked flight. Golden bouquets of dandelions aromatically rich with the gift of summers scent. Family meals that wove yet another binding thread in and through the tapestry of those seated around the table. These are but the slightest sampling of the innumerable gifts my mother handed to this child of hers. And without them, my life would be impoverished beyond words to describe.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living
With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures that sit poised on the horizon of the future. And although we ignorantly relegate such roles to some lower caste status, we would be wise to understand that the role of a mother sets the cadence of the future.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living
Don't worry, don't worry we will take care for your family members.
— Deyth Banger
We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart from ours, they are desperate for any other. They will even sing to themselves, sometimes. The boy whistles. He makes his voice croak. He sings the same thing again, but breathing in. A bird echoes the first notes of Vivaldi.
— Joanna Walsh, Vertigo
Children are God's way to rekindle the dwindling magic in relationships.
— Nilesh Rathod, Destiny of Shattered Dreams
You're officially family now
—  you've cussed at the breakfast table.
Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone,” her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. “Where’ve you been, what’ve you been up to?”“Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend?” Mandy asked.“No, what in the name of god are you on about?” her mom sighed in exasperation.“Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen?” Mandy insisted.“No, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all,” said her mom all too quickly.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby,” Calla said.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
I'm looking at the ruins of my own existence and knowing, with a sickening certainty, that my old home and my old life have been truly destroyed.
— K.C. Finn, Legion Lost
The sickest part of this whole story is that I tried really hard to make up for what I thought I did to her, after she started talking to me again. I loaned her money whenever she needed it, I gave her rides whenever she called and needed to get somewhere, I did my best to pretend like David wasn't in the room with us when I was at her house, I did whatever I could that I thought might show her that I loved her and cared about her, and I never meant to hurt her. It took a while before I realized that would never happen. She'd never love me like a mom is supposed to. She would never be there for me like I tried to be for her. She would never apologize for anything or admit that she was wrong.
— Ashly Lorenzana, Speed Needles
In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.
— Ashly Lorenzana, Speed Needles
Men were often far different in their roles as fathers than they were as suitors, the memories of which kept them, out of necessity, both vigilant and violent, and even in tender moments, to their daughters.
— James          Anderson, The Never-Open Desert Diner
A short poem from my new book, The Lost Journal of my Second Trip to Pergatory, Thorny CrownsOf course the gold one was for special occasions, weddings, etc,silver for family reunions, office-casual type affairs.Bronze was a everyday choice; during yard work its burnished surface shone in sunlight.There were various colors and holiday appropriate ones.I could never find the hatboxes they were stored in.But the wooden one was reserved for the long suffering caused by family.Stevie’s funeral, my hospital trips and sister’s rebellion rated real wood. One tip filed extra sharp produced a fine and dramatic line of blood droplets on her brow.
— Michelle  Hartman
A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living