c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful
— Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Sister, why do you do that?""Do what?""Cage the animals at night?""Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.""But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?""Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.
— Jennings Michael Burch, They Cage the Animals at Night
Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.
— Frederick Douglass
I am convinced that we as adults must constantly cling to, affirm, and celebrate with our children those things we love, sunsets, laughter, the taste of a good meal, the warmth of a hickory fire shared by real friends, the joy of discovery and accomplishment, the constant surprises of life. 
— Eliot Wigginton
Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")
— A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories
Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
Granma's name was Bonnie Bee. I knew that when I heard him late at night say, 'I kin ye, Bonnie Bee,' he was saying, 'I love ye,' for the feeling was in the words.
— Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
— Lauren Willig, The Mischief of the Mistletoe
You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)
— A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
— John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
When dancing with a pit bull, it's always best to let him lead.
— Michael  Barnett, Eden Fading
Will you be all right?" she askedHow could
— Carol Matas, Greater Than Angels
Bett didn't have any siblings because she said her father had preserved what was dead for too long to be able to create life. When Bet was younger and had begged for one, her father gave her a marmot he' stuffed for a man from Wyoming."This is your brother Christopher," he'd said, placing the marmot on Bett's pillow one night. "He doesn't talk much, so you'll have to pick up the slack there.
— Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters
The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory
If you never learned to hold onto someone, how could it possibly hurt now to let them go?
— Shannon L. Alder
Some families are an odd melting pot of strangers with the occasional offering of obligation.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.
— Francisco X. Alarcón
And in that moment, Grace understood something that she would never forget: Home wasn't just a building or an apartment with a roof and beds and chairs inside. Home was with her family, wherever they were.
— Priscilla Cummings, Saving Grace
Following her instructions, I joined her in the chopping and mixing. The magical smell of pickling spices wound around us and it wasn't long before we were in another world. I was suddenly immersed in the hand-written recipes Mother resurrected from the back of the Hoosier cabinet--in the cheesecloth filled with mustard seed and pungent dill. As we followed the recipes her mother had followed and her mother before that, we talked--as the afternoon wore on I was listening to preserve the stories in my mind. 'I can remember watching my grandmother and mother rushing around this same old kitchen, putting up all kinds of vegetables--their own hand-sown, hand-picked crops--for the winter. My grandmother would tell her stories about growing up right here, on this piece of land--some were hilarious and some were tragic.' Pots still steamed on the stove, but Mother's attention seemed directed backwards as she began to speak about the past. She spoke with a slow cadence, a rhythm punctuated (or maybe inspired) by the natural symphony around us.
— Leslie Goetsch, Back Creek
Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words ‘to father’ have such a different meaning from the words ‘to mother’.
— Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral.
— Damien Echols, Life After Death
Church and family are both primary influences designed by God for a purpose and when they work together, they are orange. Both are systems comprised of imperfect people—that’s why God desires to use them as a platform to tell his story of restoration and redemption to the world.
— Reggie Joiner, The Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide...
As parents, we have the responsibility and the power to create a foundational love for nutritious foods that will influence our children's choices for decades to come, setting the stage for our children, grandchildren, and future generations to flourish in wellness and health.
— Leah Borski
In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change. 
— Thomas M. Disch, On Wings of Song
I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.
— Scott Spencer
Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right way? We have to go with our inner instincts and the feeling in our bones. But I can contribute to their growing cells, show them some foods that are better than others, walk with them, and encourage their own tastes. I can teach them to love and appreciate food, help them treat their bodies like gold, listen to them wanting more or less. The rest I have to trust.
— Tessa Kiros, Apples for Jam: A Colorful Cookbook
...And talking of the dear family party which would then be restored, of their mutual pursuits and cheerful society, as the only happiness worth a wish.
— Jane Austen
Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Ironically, girls who don't think so much about their family and are a little bit self-centred are not only happier themselves but also maintain good relationships with their families.
— Farahad Zama
He crouched at the care window and looked in. "What a lovely family you have. What a charming family. They're all lovely. Except for that one." His finger jabbed the glass. "That one's a bit ugly."The American stepped towards him. "What? What did you say?""Oh, don't worry. I'm sure his personality makes up for his face.
— Derek Landy, Death Bringer
Having a little girl has been like following an old treasure map with the important paths torn away.
— Heather Gudenkauf, The Weight of Silence
I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
...I also have an extended family. The people who stayed. The people who became more than friends; the people who open the door when I knock. That's what it all boils down to. The people who have to open the door, not because they always want to but because they do.
— Diane Keaton, Then Again
Johanna sat by the fire every night and worked on her tapestry. Dumfries waited until she was settled in her chair and then draped himself across her feet. It became a ritual for Alex to squeeze himself up next to her and fall asleep during her stories about fierce warriors and fair maidens. Johanna's tales all had a unique twist, for none of the heroines she told stories about ever needed to be rescued by their knights in shining armor. More often than not, the fair maidens rescued their knights.Gabriel couldn't take issue with his wife. She was telling Alex the truth. It was a fact that maidens could rescue mighty, arrogant warriors. Johanna had certainly rescued him from a bleak, cold existence. She'd given him a family and a home. She was his love, his joy, his companion.She was his saving grace.
— Julie Garwood, Saving Grace
Make a wish," said Indigo.Rose made a wish and then asked, "Why?""That's what I always do. Wish on the moving ones.""Does it matter how fast they move?""I don't think so.""Can you wish on airplanes, too?""Oh, yes.
— Hilary McKay, Indigo's Star
Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.
— Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf
You really are like him, your father.""I can't tell whether you think that's good or bad.""What does it matter? It's simply true.
— Victoria Schwab, The Near Witch
Only the family, society's smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be "strangers in a strange land," who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.
— Salvador Minuchin, Families and Family Therapy
For Saffron," it said in shaky old writing on the damaged base, and on the other side, "Saffy's angel."Saffron, picking up the broken fragments one by one, said it didn't matter. She hugged Rose and Indigo and Caddy and Sarah, and said again and again that it didn't matter, it didn't matter at all.
— Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
— Martin Mull
Know me, Amber. I am Amelia Hoffman, and that," I said emphatically, gesturing towards them, "is my family. And if you or anyone does anything to harm them, I will turn the wrath of the Earth Mother on you. I will turn this entire town into a desert waste if I have to, but I will protect my family. If that makes us enemies, then I will weep for you when you are dead.
— Elizabeth Sharp, Natural Selection
The place of horror turns out to be no more than a green scoop, sometimes shadowed, sometimes shining with the bilberries and grass within it, as if a mouth had opened from which streamed a beam of light. So my uncle Robert's death, which had looked from a distance to be an all-consuming tragedy was, close-up, the story of a man finding release from his pain and how his brother had showed such defiant love. The past was a grave, a trap - and yet, also neither of these. Just light, coming and going.At the wolf pit you imagine you will stare into a hole littered with bones, but what draws you to that place is not what you take from it. The wolf pit seems a delicate illusion. You walk towards it; there is nothing, just a curve of the moor; then it is a soft green light, and then it is nothing again.
— Will Cohu, The Wolf Pit: A Moorland Romance
...Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you've ever been there, you know the signs don't tell you the exit you're coming up to, they only point out the exits you've just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods--and since you're probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with.
— Neal Shusterman, The Schwa Was Here
I read somewhere that spiders can spin silk strong enough to hold the weight of a thousand trucks. I tried to imagine those lines of silver, thinner than air, stronger than steel. Sometimes I think that a hundred webs, invisible gossamers, connect Gracie and me. They coat our bodies, tie our limbs together, link our hearts. They can stretch across cities, countries – even anger. Unbreakable. I felt them that first time I watched her play soccer.She needed to win so badly. I watched a new Gracie crack out of her cocoon that day. Grey, moth-like, she seemed covered in a dust that let her take to the air. Fly. They’re beautiful things, moths, with their dark patterned wings hooking on wind to push them forward. You have to be careful with them, though. Brush them just lightly, and they can’t fly anymore.
— Cath Crowley, The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain
In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
— Christopher Hitchens
Family' is not just a biological word, it's an an operative one.
— Andrew Vachss
Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.
— Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
it ain't as hard as picking cotton
— Wynton Marsalis
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Love
All i have to offer is this: i hold a valid driver's license and I know the way to the hospital. I can hang curtains, flip a mattress, load a dishwasher. I can deliver a pizza, lend a steadying arm, laugh at a morbid joke and compliment a bad wig and I know the metric system. I doubt that's gonna be enough.
— Brian Fies
[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.
— Amy Waldman, The Submission
Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mum told him to shut up. But she was smiling when she said it. Lucy liked that.
— Kerrie O'Connor, Through the Tiger's Eye
Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying -- an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal.
— Nick Trout, Ever By My Side: A Memoir in Eight [Acts] Pets
Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.
— Maile Meloy, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
...I decided I'd changed my mind about home. Home was not Pensacola San Diego Guam or any of the other places we might have lived. In fact home wasn't any particular place at all. Home was my family. Even if they didn't get my jokes sometimes.
— Kimberly Willis Holt, Piper Reed, The Great Gypsy
Our fights should really be for the mission of the church and the mission of the family instead of trying to have bigger churches or better families. When it comes to entities that god has created specifically to make disciples and accomplish His mission (of influencing a generation to have a stronger, deeper, and more authentic relationship with God), there is the church...the family...and nothing else.
— Reggie Joiner, The Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide...
‎"All that history, the love & laughter, is designed for youth. It is what keeps the story of who we are alive from one generation to the next. It ensures our indelible mark in the souls of generations we will never have the pleasure of holding in a warm embrace. Life is short people. Before you know it, another decade will pass, people you love will be lost to this world, and all that will be left of them is what we carry in our hearts." Elsie Love 2011
— Elsie Love
Raised on a cotton farm in rural Georgia, as many white/negro families did to make a meager living, my daddy had a saying.'All a poor man has is his good name and good credit. God help him if he looses either of those.'I still believe that.
— Susan Ethridge, Murder in Cleveland, Ga
Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
There was once a king, and he had a queen; and he was the manliest of his gender, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more.
— Charles Dickens
Church has believed that parents probably wont' assume responsibility for their own children's growth, so they have tried to become a parent substitute. This in turn ha s fostered parents to adopt a "drop-off" mentality. Maybe the greatest gift a church can give parents is the confidence and courage to do what God has wired them to do.
— Reggie Joiner, The Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide...
Abba, you may not like it, but what I'm doing is important. If you don't agree, then I'm sorry. I can't do anything about it.
— Farahad Zama
Tobias loved her more than he’d loved anything—his family, his duty, even himself. There, perhaps, the Herondale blood ran true.
— Cassandra Clare, The Lost Herondale
Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" Pointing to his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers... (Matthew 12:48)
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version
What manner of mind considers this holy estate [pregnancy] which women are privileged by the Almighty to attain as a slur upon the social conscience?
— Grantly Dick-Read
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.
— Salman Rushdie, East, West
When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom
— William Saroyan, The Human Comedy
A man’s weakness is his family and a woman’s is her child
— M.F. Moonzajer
She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible. "What's wrong with it?" I asked her. "It's not good enough yet. You have to try harder," she said, her voice gentle. "You have to try hard at everything you do. That's all I ask." I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too - wanting to do my best, expecting my best.
— Daisy Whitney, When You Were Here
Mother was anchor. Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.
— Harold S. Kushner
Life is this simple ~ birth, eat, drink, play, explore, and relate to family and friends; be happy and enjoy life…!
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
Moms are the onesWho make sure of a lot of thingsLike that their kidsWear nice clothes,Comb their hair,Brush their teeth.And moms teach their kidsHow to fold laundrySo their cloths aren't wrinkled,How to make scrambled eggsWithout turning them brown,How to make a girl feel like a girlWithout a mom to make herfeel that way?
— Nancy J. Cavanaugh
Leah: I want those gubs Mommy.Kate: They're not 'gubs' they're 'gloves'Aaden and Leah try and say glovesLeah: Gloves!Kate: Good job!Aaden: Gubs!Kate: No
— Kate Gosselin
Without love, life was nothing but endless tasks and battles.
— Michelle M. Pillow, The Reluctant Lord
Do you know what I remember? When [my father] read to me. Stupid things, dragons and heroes. He wouldn’t turn a page until I reached over and took his hand. That big man made every step of the story my choice. I loved that. He died of the wasting, in a Denerim ward. Those last weeks I read to him. I had to take his hand to turn the pages. And I couldn’t tell if he was too weak, or if it was the old game…No one tells you how to mourn. And when someone says, “move on”, you take their hand and say “my choice.
— Aveline Valen
She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors
I wanted nothing more out of life than I did to keep my family together and make sure they were safe. The memory of those days reminds me of how exhausted I had been, but my siblings gave my life purpose, they were my bridge from pain to healing, from past to future. They are as much the authors of my survival as I am of theirs.
— Ruth Wariner, The Sound of Gravel
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Here's to real heroes, not the ones who carry us off into the sunset but the ones who help us choose our princes." - commentary on Castles on the Sand
— E.M. Tippetts
If there's a more helpless feeling than trying to reach someone you love who's trapped underground, I don't know it.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?
— Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
You have to make your own family, your own life.
— Francesca Lia Block, Pink Smog
She raised her sad blue eyes to mine. "It's going to be so boring here without you. And I'm going to have to deal with Grandmother on my own! You need to e-mail, text, call, send smoke signals--whatever--and tell me everything you're doing."I laughed. "Yes, I know. Every day. I promise.
— Shannon Greenland, The Summer My Life Began
Ain't nothing more important than loving your mama. Even if you can't understand her. Love her. That's all you gotta do.
— Julie Cantrell, Into the Free
Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.
— Francesca Lia Block, Baby Be-Bop
We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed each another and made us one. Simple as that.
— Cynthia Rylant, Missing May
Brothers and sisters should never be in the same family.
— Charles M. Schulz
The passive and overt violence waged against the women and children of the world must end.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
There is no such thing as a normal family so don't trip off it, just deal with it.
— Ice-T
She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.
— Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.
— Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury
It doesn't matter what story we're telling, we're telling the story of family.
— Erica Lorraine Scheidt
If we adopted Jack," I quip, "we'd have to give him combat pay for an allowance
— Daven Anderson, Vampire Syndrome
In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.
— Helen Brown, After Cleo
Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.
— Patricia Highsmith
The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.
— John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family --- that's the always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.
— Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
— George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
My father is an apparition, and my mother is semiconscious.
— Jessica Warman, Breathless
Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.
— Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents' lives before I was born.
— Robert Drewe, The Shark Net
Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.
— Dee Hock, One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.
— Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches
If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination  through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
— A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
Our meeting was inevitable. Our love was terminal. But God and Goddess damn it, our daughter was no mistake at all.
— Edward Morris, Blood of Eden
Family is what works.
— Ian McDonald, Planesrunner
In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.''Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence. My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.''Do you know what you're saying?'My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?It was obvious to everyone. ~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack;
— Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
[Phoebe Broome] 'Well,' she said at last. 'You've now met my father. At his worst.'[Lord Vladimir] 'Being myself widely considered my family's most difficult member, I would not presume to comment.''That is... gentlemanly of you.
— Alison Sinclair, Lightborn
Jeff Hudson started me on a path that was key, and as life goes on it's become a mantra to me. It's that you're born into a family, your family of origin, and you're stuck with it. Once I recognized that, it freed me up to have a different kind of family: a family of choice. The people I surround myself with, spend holidays with, look to for support and comfort and validation -- that's my family of choice.
— Bob Mould, See A Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
Nona was as wacky as they came.
— Holly Hood, Ink
Gran follows recipes by looking at picture—to the eye, delicious; to the tongue, boiled socks. Makes you wanna cry really.
— Simon Cheshire, Plastic Fantastic
Mother is a humble woman. Very, very humble. She toils at a small café one hour distance from our home. She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me, "I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. You want to know why? It is for you, Alexi-stop-spleening-me! One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family." What she does not clutch is that I already do things for her that I hate. I listen to her when she talks to me. I resist complaining about my pygmy allowance. And did I mention that I do not spleen her nearly so much as I desire to? But I do not do these things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.
— Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
— Alex Haley
By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.
— Rabih Alameddine, I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters
Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
The number of family secrets is just staggering.
— Jill A. Davis, Ask Again Later
On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
….two slate-colored gravestones settled at a slant into the lower corner of the field beside the lane. She could not read the names engraved on them, but she knew what they were. Joseph Watson, 1820-1891, and James Watson, son of Joseph and Hannah Watson, 1844-1863. The grave of Hannah Watson lay beside her husband’s and because she had died last, she had no marker, unless the pine tree growing there might count as one. To-morrow two men would drive up and leave a basket of flowers and a flag for Joseph because he had fought in the Civil War, and for James because he had died on his way home from it, but they would not have anything for Hannah because she had only identified her son James one hot summer day on the platform of North Derwich Station, and raised all the food her husband ate for twenty years as he sat in a chair in her kitchen, and done washings for Mrs. Hale to buy monuments for them at the end. But the flowers would die in the boxes; even if Jen found time to go down and set out the pansy plants in the ground, stray cows were sure to eat them off before the summer was over; and the Forrest children would take the flags to play with. Nothing would interfere with the tree.
— Gladys Hasty Carroll, As the Earth Turns
Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
You don't love Buck. If you did, you'd have four kids by now. Wouldn't you? Now wouldn't you? A woman like you...
— Erskine Caldwell
It was a family joke that Lydia's domestic tendencies were somehow misplaced when she was created.
— Lawana Blackwell, The Dowry of Miss Lydia Clark
When a new baby is expected mother has 9 months to prepare the family and the kitchen for her departure!
— Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia, NMAA Cooks
From "Caleb's Crossing"--This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers."Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me.
— Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing
My emotional world imploded, and there is nothing that could have been said or done to make it easier. No one was in the wrong, and maybe that is what made it so painful. I wanted someone to blame, but instead got the two people I loved most doing their best to navigate uncharted waters.
— Sara Bareilles, Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song
Coming home is hard." Ven said."It shouldn't be" Daleina said. "They love me. I love them. It should be easy.""Once you leave, it's never easy again. Or at least it's never the same. You're not the same. You can't expect them to be.She nodded. "Sometimes they feel like strangers. And still, I'd die to protect them.
— Sarah Beth Durst, The Queen of Blood
Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there’s true remorse. Nothing will be right until there’s that.” “He looks so, sort of, weakened.” “Weakened is not enough. Destroyed isn’t enough. He’s got to repent and feel humiliation and regret. I won’t be satisfied until he knows what he is.”"Do we know what we are?""We know we aren’t him. We know that to that degree we don’t yet deserve the lowest circle of hell.
— Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Now, as they pressured perfect footprints into the snow that had been accumulating all day, his father took Harry's hand."Heshele, how are you?""OK, I guess.""Are you very sad?""I don't know. I know I should be. But what does it mean to be sad?"His father stopped. He cupped his free hand to let the snow gather. It quickly turned from an inviting white coating to black-specked gray water."Sadness is in my hand. In a second, a thing of beauty becomes dirty water; innocence leaves a child's eyes; he who strived for immortality lies forgotten under weeds. Sad is missing the love that death has sealed in the ground or that life has denied life to.""Then I'm sad. When you took my hand, I remembered how he took my hand when we went to the pier to fish. And I thought: That will never happen again. And then I thought: Up until now I never understood the word never, and there was a lump in my throat.
— Amram Ducovny, Coney
It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.
— Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
I passionately believe home cooking has vast benefit to individuals, families, community, environment and animal welfare, but in today’s busy society it is often the first thing we outsource. While some may argue this makes economic sense, the cost and benefit of doing so cannot be measured in dollars alone.
— Alyce Alexandra
He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.
— Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
For the first time in fifteen years, he felt a mother's love again.
— R. A. Rooney
Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about 'family' we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.
— Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart
The greatest gift a church can receive is to have a group of families who take their responsibilities with such Christian seriousness that they are willing to completely alter their lifestyle to raise up disciples for Jesus Christ.
— Abraham Kuyper, attrib.
I love being here, Evelyn, don't think that I don't. Yes, I do miss being in New York, but being with a great family for Christmas is the best thing any guy could get. It's been the best year I've had for a quite a long time.
— R.A. Rooney
Although reality can sometimes corrupt the fairy tale and alter our ambitions, some things remain unalterable. From the richest to the poorest, we start and end with family.
— Michael Robotham, The Wreckage
You can't always save the ones you love from being hurt.
— Gina Linko, Flower Moon
But it is. It’s something you need, and that’s a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don’t need is a man who can’t let go of the useless baggage of his memories.
— Stephen King, The Waste Lands
The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Yes, King Eirik, I can't do this alone. I'm not a knight or even a fighter for that matter. I'm just a normal boy, who is looking for his Grandfather.
— Robert Ian Wilson, Egbert's World
A virtuous wife is an indispensable asset in the hand of her husband . In contrary, a nagging wife is a liability to her husband . There is nothing she cannot destroy.
— Adewale Osunsakin, Time To Awake Christian Magazine
It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.
— John Darnielle, Universal Harvester
Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.
— Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction
Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.
— William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago
Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldn’t be saved, Esther’s heart broke a little more.
— Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares