c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it.
— Rick Riordan
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough
— Walt Whitman
Hermes gazed up at the stars. 'My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn't matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don't appreciate your genius for inventing the Internet--
— Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
Abe held my gaze a bit longer and then broke into an easy smile. ʺOf course, of course. This is a family gathering. A celebration. And look: hereʹs our newest member.ʺ Dimitri had joined us and wore black and white like my mother and me. He stood beside me, conspicuously not touching. ʺMr. Mazur,ʺ he said formally, nodding a greeting to both of them. ʺGuardian Hathaway.ʺ Dimitri was seven years older than me, but right then, facing my parents, he looked like he was sixteen and about to pick me up for a date. ʺAh, Belikov,ʺ said Abe, shaking Dimitriʹs hand. ʺIʹd been hoping weʹd run into each other. Iʹd really like to get to know you better. Maybe we can set aside some time to talk, learn more about life, love, et cetera. Do you like to hunt? You seem like a hunting man. Thatʹs what we should do sometime. I know a great spot in the woods. Far, far away. We could make a day of it. Iʹve certainly got a lot of questions Iʹd like to ask you. A lot of things Iʹd like to tell you too.ʺ I shot a panicked look at my mother, silently begging her to stop this. Abe had spent a good deal of time talking to Adrian when we dated, explaining in vivid and gruesome detail exactly how Abe expected his daughter to be treated. I did not want Abe taking Dimitri off alone into the wilderness, especially if firearms were involved. ʺActually,ʺ said my mom casually. ʺIʹd like to come along. I also have a number of questions—especially about when you two were back at St. Vladimirʹs.ʺ ʺDonʹt you guys have somewhere to be?ʺ I asked hastily. ʺWeʹre about to start.ʺ That, at least, was true. Nearly everyone was in formation, and the crowd was quieting. ʺOf course,ʺ said Abe. To my astonishment, he brushed a kiss over my forehead before stepping away. ʺIʹm glad youʹre back.ʺ Then, with a wink, he said to Dimitri: ʺLooking forward to our chat.ʺ ʺRun,ʺ I said when they were gone. ʺIf you slip out now, maybe they wonʹt notice. Go back to Sib
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family.
— Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
— Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Nothing like watching your relatives fight, I always say.
— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate
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.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
— Frederick Buechner
Friends are God's way of apologizing for your family.
— Wayne W. Dyer, The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way
Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else.
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.
— Mother Teresa
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.
— Mitch Albom
A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones. 
— Kristin Hannah, Summer Island
Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.
— Pierce Brown, Golden Son
It's very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you're not perfect.
— E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
Home is where you are loved the most and act the worst.
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley
Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.
— Andrea Lavinthal, Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
I'll love you forever,I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be.
— Robert Munsch, Love You Forever
I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you...
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Family isn't blood. It's the people who love you. The people who have your back.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it’s own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that’s why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot—being only human—put asunder what God has joined together.
— Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt
No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.
— Claire LaZebnik, Epic Fail
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,then from my eyes,my ears,my mouth.It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
— E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
Percy blinked. “So your brother is a winged horse. But you’re also my half brother, which means all the flying horses in the world are my…You know what? Lets’ forget it.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
we must take care of our families wherever we find them.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (Faber and Faber Screenplays) Screenplay based on the book
He’s my brother, my blood. He annoys the hell out of me most of the time, but when it comes right down to it I want to see him graduate from college and have little annoying mini-Alexes and mini-Brittanys running around in the future
— Simone Elkeles, Rules of Attraction
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
— Jerry Seinfeld
It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
I don't know who my grandfather was
—  I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
To you who are parents, I say, show love to your children. You know you love them, but make certain they know it as well. They are so precious. Let them know. Call upon our Heavenly Father for help as you care for their needs each day and as you deal with the challenges which inevitably come with parenthood. You need more than your own wisdom in rearing them.
— Thomas S. Monson
There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family. Or more happy. Or more exasperated. Or more . . . secure.
— Jim Butcher, Vignette
When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911. 
— Erma Bombeck
True best friends never fail on understanding, forgiving, and being there for one another no matter what situation that they might be in or having with one another because of the fact of that no matter if it’s two males or females love should always be there as if brothers or sisters if their what we call best friends.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett, Friends 2 Lovers: The Unthinkable
The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.
— Mother Teresa
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant." I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed." If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.
— Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca
Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.
— Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
I always hear people talk about 'dysfunctional families.' It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there's this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don't mean, and there's never a time when sharp objects should be hidden. Well, I'm sorry, but that family doesn't exist. And if you find some neighbors that seem to be the grinning model of 'function,' trust me - that's the family that will get arrested for smuggling arms in their SUV between soccer games.The best you can really hope for is a family where everyone's problems, big and small, work together. Kind of like an orchestra where every instrument is out of tune, in exactly the same way, so you don't really notice.
— Neal Shusterman, Antsy Does Time
I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.
— August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes -- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just like Harry's did.Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection."Mum?" he whispered. "Dad?"They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees -- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life.The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Scrubbing the floor when no one else wanted to was something that my mother would have done. If I can't be with her, the least I can do is act like her sometimes.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
He’d learned years ago it was better not to dwell too much on who was related to whom on the godly side of things. After Tyson the Cyclops adopted him as a brother, Percy decided that that was about as far as he wanted to extend the family.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
Is this what family is like: the feeling that everyone’s connected, that with one piece missing, the whole thing’s broken?
— Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society
Later, when you're grown up, you realize you never really get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that's it.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.
— Robert Frost
I will see you again,’ Hades promised. ‘I will prepare a room for you at the palace in case you do not survive. Perhaps your chambers would look good decorated with the skulls of monks.’ ‘Now I can’t tell if you’re joking.’ Hades’s eyes glittered as his form began to fade. ‘Then perhaps we are alike in some important ways.’ The god vanished.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
So that’s your sister?” asks Dee in a quiet voice.“Yeah.”“The one you risked your life for?”“Yeah.”The twins nod politely in that automatic way that people do when they don’t want to say something insulting.“Your family any better?” I ask.Dee and Dum look at each other, assessing.“Nah,” says Dee.“Not really,” says Dum at the same time.
— Susan Ee, World After
You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
— Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending
All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
— Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
Hagrid, look what I’ve got for relatives!” Harry said furiously. “Look at the Dursleys!”“An excellent point,” said Professor Dumbledore. “My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms on a goat. It was all over the papers, but did Aberforth hide? No, he did not! He held his head high and went about his business as usual! Of course, I’m not entirely sure he can read, so that may not have been bravery. . . .
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
Family is not an important thing, it's everything.
— Michael J. Fox
God is the designer of the family.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
He made it very clear that he didn’t want me here,” she said at last. “That my remaining at the Institute is not the happy chance I thought it was. Not in his view.”	“And after I just finished telling you why you should consider him family,” Jem said, a bit ruefully. “No wonder you looked as if I’d just told you something awful just happened.”	“I’m sorry,” Tessa whispered.	“Don’t be. It’s Will who ought to be sorry.” Jem’s eyes darkened. “We shall throw him out onto the streets,” he proclaimed. “I promise you he’ll be gone by morning.”	Tessa started and sat upright. “Oh – no, you can’t mean that─”	He grinned. “Of course I don’t. But you did feel better for a moment there, didn’t you?
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
A woman or man of value doesn’t love you because of what he or she wants you to be or do for them. He or she loves you because your combined souls understand one another, complements each other, and make sense above any other person in this world. You each share a part of their soul's mirror and see each other’s light reflected in it clearly. You can easily speak from the heart and feel safe doing so. Both of you have been traveling a parallel road your entire life. Without each other's presence, you feel like an old friend or family member was lost. It bothers you, not because you have given it too much meaning, but because God did. This is the type of person you don't have to fight for because you can't get rid of them and your heart doesn't want them to leave anyways.
— Shannon L. Alder
Getting some redecorating ideas?’ Nico asked. ‘Maybe you could do your dining room in mediaeval monk skulls.’ Hades arched an eyebrow. ‘I can never tell when you’re joking.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Will is… difficult,” Jem said. “But family is difficult. If I didn’t think the Institute was the best place for you, Tessa, I wouldn’t say it was. And one can build one’s own family. I know you feel inhuman, and as if you were set apart, away from life and love, but…” His voice cracked a little, the first time Tessa had heard him sound unsure. He cleared his throat. “I promise you, the right man won’t care.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vinesLived twelve little girls in two straight linesIn two straight lines they broke their breadAnd brushed their teeth and went to bed.They left the house at half past nineIn two straight lines in rain or shine-The smallest one was Madeline.
— Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
— Winston S. Churchill
No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.
— Erma Bombeck
Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose.""You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that much more in common. Diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It's like they're part of your blueprint. If something's wrong with you, you can usually trace it back to them."I nodded and kept writing."But," she said, "even though you're stuck with them, at the same time, they're also stuck with you. So that's why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they're the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not.
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but a the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
Hades allowed himself the faintest smile, but there was nothing cruel in his eyes. ‘I can entertain the possibility that you acted for multiple reasons. My point is this: you and I rose to the aid of Olympus because you convinced me to let go of my anger. I would encourage you to do likewise. My children are so rarely happy. I … I would like to see you be an exception.’ Nico stared at his father. He didn’t know what to do with that statement. He could accept many unreal things – hordes of ghosts, magical labyrinths, travel through shadows, chapels made of bones. But tender words from the Lord of the Underworld? No. That made no sense.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
I'm allergic to family occasions. Sometimes I think we'd do better as dandelion seeds-no family, no history, just floating off into the world, each on our own piece of fluff.
— Sophie Kinsella, Twenties Girl
If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
— Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Children need to be raised in loving environments. Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
She wants you to be a god," I told him."I know." His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Before you were conceived, I wanted you. Before you were born, I loved you. Before you were an hour, I would die for you. This is the miracle of love.
— Maureen Hawkins
The Screamingflashed me back to a timewhen mom and dad were still togetherif you could call miles apart together.
— Ellen Hopkins
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories
I was just going to say it reminds me of the symbols on a family crest.”Noah stopped mid-stride, and turned very slowly. “We’re not related.”“I know, but—”“Don’t even think it.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer
Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.
— Harriet Brown
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man. 
— Toni Morrison
That's the best thing about little sisters: They spend so much time wishing they were elder sisters that in the end they're far wiser than the elder ones could ever be.
— Gemma Burgess
If she wasn't your grandmother I'd shoot her."Ranger
— Janet Evanovich, Hot Six
In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.
— Marge Kennedy
If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
He'd learned long ago: perfection isn't what families are all about.
— Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage. . . 
— Rosamund Lupton
To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.
— Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful  Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Talaith leaned forward, studied her youngest daughter. “You think you’re evil?”“Pure evil,” Izzy clarified, which got her a rather vicious glare from Rhi. An expression Dagmar had never thought the young,perpetually smiling or sobbing girl was capable of.“Why would you think you’re evil?”“It’s a feeling I have.”“No. Someone told her.”Rhi glowered at her sister. “I never said that.”“You didn’t have to,” Izzy shot back. “I know you.”“Well, who told her that?” Talaith demanded.And, as one, they all turned and looked at Gwenvael.He blinked, sat up straight. “I would never say such a thing to my dear sweet niece!”“You said it to me,” Talwyn snapped.“That’s because you’re not my dear sweet niece. You’re the rude little cow who threw a knife at my head.”“I wasn’t aiming for you. I was aiming for Mum.”“She’s right,” Annwyl admitted. “I just ducked behind you.” She shrugged. “Sorry.
— G.A. Aiken, How to Drive a Dragon Crazy
He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
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.
— Toni Morrison
Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.
— Anthony Brandt
Hermes gazed up at the stars. "My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn't matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don't appreciate your genius for inventing the Internet-""You invented the Inte
— Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.
— Tori Spelling
You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can’t trade them in. You can’t lie to them. You can’t run two at once, substituting back and forth.“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
— John Paul II
I do have a point to all this,” she continues. “There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family.” She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. “You still have a family,” she whispers.
— Gayle Forman, If I Stay
In two words," said Alan quietly, "there is nothing I love half as much as you.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Covenant
We share out craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love.
— Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
These people make my family look easy to get along with.
— Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-""The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl." He sounds bitter and sad."If the world will not forgive me," I say softly, "I shall have to learn to forgive myself."He nods in understanding."And how will you marry? Or do you intend to marry?"I think of Kartik, and tears threaten. "I shall meet someone one day, as Mother found you.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier.
— Morgan Matson, Second Chance Summer
Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.
— Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid
When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.
— Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
The best part of having a relationship is getting to call the person or lay down next to them and tell them all the crazy things that happened to you all day long, and in the end that’s what it’s about, kids. It’s not about the sex, it’s not about the money that they give you or whatever. It’s not about how good-looking they are, it’s about, can they listen to you talk for hours and hours and hours about stupid shit that doesn't matter.
— Tegan Quin
One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.
— Anne Fadiman
My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]
— John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
I know family comes first, but shouldn't that mean after breakfast?
— Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter
Family isnt about blood relationships, its about the meaning behind them. I relize now that sharing chromosoms is not the only way to having a family, its about the friendship behind it.
— Sarah Dessen
No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.
— Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home
Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.
— Voltaire
What do you think it would have been like if Valentine had brought you up along with me? Would you have loved me?"Clary was very glad she had put her cup down, because if she hadn't, she would have dropped it.Sebastian was looking at her not with any shyness or the sort of natural awkwardness that might be attendant on such a bizarre question, but as if she were a curious, foreign life-form."Well," she said. "You're my brother. I would have loved you. I would have...had to.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls
The terrible things that happen to us in life never make any sense when we're in the middle of them, floundering, no end in sight. There is no rope to hang on to, it seems. Mothers can soothe children during those times, through their reassurance. No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn to her anymore, and it changes your life forever. There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you'd had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childgood goes with her. Memories are very different and cannot soothe you the same way her touch did.
— Adriana Trigiani, Big Stone Gap
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
— Alex Haley
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most relentless force of all, which is time.
— Dean Koontz, Relentless
Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.
— Sue Grafton, A is for Alibi
Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn't, family that wasn't family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players.
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
Family is more than blood
— Cassandra Clare
It has an L on it. L for love. See? It's the key to the universe, Dad. You said you were looking for it. You told Mom you were. I found it for you so you don't have to look anymore. So you can come home at night.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
If it's to protect our family, be it the Kingdom or the entire world... We would make anyone our enemy! That's what it means to be Fairy Tail!!
— Hiro Mashima
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.
— Holly Black, White Cat
Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere
— Peter Abrahams, Down the Rabbit Hole
Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.
— Vikki Wakefield, Friday Brown
Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again - the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day and all the days that we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more? There could not be many; for we were a family growing old. And how would I learn to live without these people? I who needed them so little that I could stay away all year - what should I do without them?
— Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine
For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?
— Russell Brand
It was like how people find other people to be in love with, all random and accidental and lucky.
— Jennifer Castle, The Beginning of After
My mother hasn’t asked the questions that a normal person would ask, and I’m grateful for it. It’s like the world has become so crazy that it makes sense to her now. I turn on the engine and drive us out. ‘Thanks, Mom. For coming to rescue me.’ My voice comes out reedy and a little wobbly. I clear my throat. ‘Not every mom would do that in a world like this.
— Susan Ee, End of Days
We don't get to choose who we love. Or stop loving them when they're difficult.
— Jessica Spotswood, Born Wicked
What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.
— P.C. Cast
It's a commonly expressed and rather nice, romantic notion that we are all "sisters" and "brot
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
I like football. I find its an exciting strategic game. Its a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving.
— Craig Ferguson
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.
— Orson Scott Card, Hidden Empire
A fucked-up family's a fucked-up family, whether or not werewolves are involved.
— Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Takes a Holiday
Donit kill her now, just when we've gone to all that trouble to rescue her," said Jeffrey.
— Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.
— Marilynne Robinson
I know they're not getting divorced or anything, but when your parents argue it makes the whole universe seem like it's tipping, like everything could change if they got mad enough at each other, like the world isn't a safe place.And of course, that's true, isn't it? The world is not a safe place.
— E. Lockhart, The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon—and me, Ruby Oliver
It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
For me, family means the silent treatment. At any given moment, someone is always not speaking to someone else.'Really,' I said.We're passive-aggressive people,' she explained, taking a sip of her coffee. 'Silence is our weapon of choice. Right now, for instance, I'm not speaking to two of my sisters and one brother... At mine [my house], silence is golden. And common.'To me,' Reggie said, picking up a bottle of Vitamin A and moving it thoughtfully from one hand to the other, 'family is, like, the wellspring of human energy. The place where all life begins.'...Harriet considered this as she took a sip of coffee. 'Huh,' she said. 'I guess when someone else does something worse. Then you need people on your side, so you make up with one person, jsut as you're getting pissed off at another.' So it's an endless cycle,' I said.I guess.' She took another sip. 'Coming together, falling apart. Isn't that what families are all about?
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.
— Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels
We didn’t want to admit it then, but we were friends. Best friends.
— Shannon Celebi
Oh, brothers and sisters, families can be forever! Do not let the lures [or the irritants] of the moment draw you away from them! Divinity, eternity, and family--they go together, hand in hand, and so must we!
— Spencer W. Kimball
At the time of his death, Biko had a wife and three children for which he left a letter that stated in one part: “I've devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I've denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites.
— Steve Biko
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
She smiled, pulling the photo a little closer, and I wondered if I should ask her, too, the question for my project, get her definition. But as she ran a finger slowly across the faces, identifying each one, it occurred to me that maybe this was her answer. All those names, strung together like beads on a chain. Coming together, splitting apart, but still and always, a family. (page 289) ~Ruby
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
I am a Smedry, and we do ridiculous, unexpected, eccentric things like this all the time! Ha-ha!
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens
I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.
— Sarah Palin
We want to climb in with you,' Dermot said. 'We'll all sleep better.'That seemed incredibly weird and creepy to me - or maybe I only thought it should have. I was simply too tired to argue. I climbed in the bed. Claude got in on one side of me, Dermot on the other. Just when I was thinking, I would never be able to sleep, that this situation was too odd and too wrong, I felt a kind of blissful relaxation roll through my body, a kind of unfamiliar comfort. I was with family. I was with blood.And I slept.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead in the Family
Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
What can we do?" Mom asked again.I shrugged.But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Ten-Year Nap
It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.
— Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
It's the family you choose that counts.
— Andrew Vachss
By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. 
— Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
It's funny how two people can grow up in the same town, go to the same school, have the same friends, and end up so totally different. Family, or lack of it, counts for more than you'd think.
— Sarah Dessen, The Moon and More
The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that.
— Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
You cannot know where your people are going if you don't know where your people have been.
— Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree