Extended Family Quotes

In the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting ~ Will Schwalbe

Rather, both sides fought as soldiers fought in most wars - for survival, and to protect the men who had become extended family. ~ Stanley Weintraub

The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious. ~ Esther Perel

Because a person chooses to leave their home country and come to the United States does not necessarily mean they have the right to demand that their father or their other extended family members be allowed to come if they don't otherwise meet the standard. ~ Jeff Sessions

So this is the way it unfolds. In the absence of what people like my grandfather could count on - a vast extended family constantly on hand to let him make his own choices - our elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about. ~ Atul Gawande

We owe some of our family members respect, but do not owe any of them love. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

How to Perform Visualization

To practice visualization, sit in a comfortable position and relax any muscle tension. Once you feel relaxed, begin to visualize a pleasant scene. Imagine every aspect of the scene, using all of your senses. For instance, if you visualize sitting on a beach watching the ocean waves lapping against the shore, imagine first what the scene looks like, then imagine how the sand feels on your bare feet. Take a deep breath and imagine how the clean ocean air smells and tastes. Next, listen for the sounds of the waves and seagulls.
As you become more involved with your mental picture, your body will relax and you will be able to let go of your worrisome thoughts. It often helps to make positive, affirmative statements, such as "I feel calm and relaxed," while practicing to block negative thoughts more effectively. You could picture also an image that represents the tension you feel when you begin, such as a kite that is stuck in a tree getting more and more tangled. As you become relaxed, imagine the string loosening and the kite becoming free and soaring in the sky.
With practice, you will be able to use this technique to help yourself relax whenever you feel distressed.

Lori spent last Thanksgiving at her best friend Haley's house. Most of the members of Haley's large, extended family were there. Everyone was talking at once, the children were running around, and Lori felt completely overwhelmed. It was so different fro ~ Heather Moehn

The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome. ~ David Maraniss

In Asia, it's customary to get together with your entire extended family on a regular basis, and it's all rife with politics. ~ Kevin Kwan

It is through our extended family that we first learn to compromise and come to an understanding that even if we don't always agree about things we can still love and look out for each other. ~ Sara Sheridan

The insidious reasons for a brown girl's self-loathing won't be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations - and what they mean about your worth - might not dawn on you while you're playing cricket in the sand. What's at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. ~ Padma Lakshmi

When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare. ~ Martin E.P. Seligman

And don't try to make yourself an extended family out of ghosts on the Internet. Get yourself a Harley and join the Hell's Angels instead. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Email helps me keep in touch with my family. I wouldn't know what my extended family was doing every day if we weren't emailing each other. ~ Mark Batterson

We didn't have much money. My whole extended family used to help us, and buy us books and food. It was hard, and there were things I didn't want to talk about. But at the end I was a happy girl. ~ Maria Das Gracas Silva Foster

Global health issues remind us - perhaps more than any other issue - that we are all children of the same extended family. ~ Kathleen Sebelius

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life. ~ Dani Shapiro

My son has two loving parents and an extended family, whether it's cousins or stepmothers or boyfriends. My son is surrounded by love. ~ Bridget Moynahan

Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives' families. Each extended family lived in a "long house." When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband's things outside the door. ~ Howard Zinn

If I as Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala take my family, my brothers and sisters, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable small business.

If I take my extended family both maternal and partenal, my aunts and uncles and my cousins, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable medium business.

If I take Ba Ga Mohlala family in general, including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable Big Business business.

If I take Banareng clan including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable multinational business.

YET, we are not able to do that because of lack of unity, and the lack of unity is caused by selfishness and lack of trust.

At the moment what we have is majority of successful independent individuals running their individual successful, profitable and sustainable small businesses and successful individuals pursuing their own fulfilling careers.

If ever we want to succeed as families and one united clan, we need to start by addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness. Other than that, anything th ~ Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala

Our most basic institution of family desperately needs help and support from the extended family and the public institutions that surround us. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins can make a powerful difference in the lives of children. Remember that the expression of love and encouragement from an extended family member will often provide the right influence and help a child at a critical time. ~ M. Russell Ballard

The photographs had made him aware how much the street and the buildings meant to him. Like an extended family that he'd taken for granted and ignored, assuming it would always be there. But buildings and roads and spaces were as fragile as human beings, you had to cherish them while you had them. ~ Rohinton Mistry

I think love courses through all of us, and we can express it to one person all the time, or we can express it to everybody in our world, in our immediate world, in our extended family and all that and to strangers. I think as a concept. I don't mean you and me later. ~ Bruce Greenwood

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone. ~ Camille Paglia

God healed everything in my life from a non-curable disease, bad programming from child sexual abuse, father and mother wounds, bitterness, hatred, rage, rejection, nightmares from the sex industry, sleep disorder, early cervical cancer in 2001, post traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, mental disorders, and more. God also restored my marriage and relationships with my extended family. Even my mother-in-law loved me now! ~ Shelley Lubben

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family. ~ Isabel Allende

I'm often asked if I regret not going to Hollywood. I'm glad I didn't go, because if I had I wouldn't have my extended family, which is the fabric of my life. Only recently have I realised how special and unusual it is. ~ Francesca Annis

I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street. ~ Bruce Springsteen

It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket. ~ Min Jin Lee

Perhaps the most important Stoic legacy to the history of moral thought was the concept of universal humanity. In his famous Elements of Ethics, the second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles imagines every individual as standing at the centre of a series of concentric circles. The first circle is the individual, next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family, the local community, the country, and finally the entire human race. To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. The Stoics called this process of drawing the circles together oikeiosis, a word that is almost untranslatable but means something like the process by which everything is made into your home. ~ Kenan Malik

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past. ~ John Thorn

No one ever said, 'Be a doctor.' But because so many members of my extended family - aunts, uncles - were doctors, there was this expectation that I'd probably be a physician. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

I don't want you to think I don't love my extended family. I do. I just don't want to be around them. Some of this is because I'm a loner. Some of this is because at family gatherings you are forced to face the short genetic distance between you and a clinically insane person. ~ Jim Gaffigan

You know, just in terms of having to have a life on the road, you know, having the celebrity aspect be a burden for my family, friends and extended family. ~ Julius Erving

I hope you'll learn that no matter how bad things become, there's always light at the end of the tunnel. As long as you have faith in God, respect, and love for each other, you can make it - no matter what.
I have been extremely fortunate to be blessed with all the good things life has to offer. I had the best brothers, the kindest parents, a remarkable extended family, and of course good friends.
I married a wonderful man and together we've created our own beautiful family. I would gladly give up anything in my possession to keep them safe, and for all of this, I thank God for the blessings he has bestowed upon me and my family. ~ Marlies Adams Difante

I'm the only person in my entire extended family that plays an instrument or sings, really. Which is kind of weird. I don't know where I got it from. ~ Ryan Lewis

I will always find something that I want to try and become better at. I always love to spend more time with my friends, more time with my family, my extended family. I always want to read more books. ~ Connie Nielsen

call me a nobody. He just had a lot on his mind. 'You ever meet your dad?' I asked. 'Once.' I waited, thinking that if he wanted to tell me, he'd tell me. Apparently, he didn't. I wondered if the story had anything to do with how he got his scar. Luke looked up and managed a smile. 'Don't worry about it, Percy. The campers here, they're mostly good people. After all, we're extended family, right? We take care ~ Rick Riordan

You're part of the extended family, Sheriff," Barb told him, tweaking his ear. She was cooling down. "And besides, we may need you on Saturday. If the little bastards get rowdy, you can legally off'm with your Uzi." She pointed to the small revolver Pierce sometimes carried in a discreet (I daresay tasteful) shoulder holster of burnished tan leather. ~ Michael Craft

1945 Elsie, I hope this letter finds its way to your good hands. Tobias and I are among friends in Zurich. The news of the Allied invasion of Garmisch is bittersweet. Though we are German, our Fatherland is no longer a welcoming place. The Jewish families I hid for over a year - the Mailers and the Zuckermanns - lost nearly all their extended family members over the course of these wretched years. Thanks to your engagement ring, we were able to bribe the SS guards and smuggle Nanette Mailer, her friend, and the Zuckermanns' niece, Tabita, from KZ Dachau before the march. Unfortunately, Tobias's sister, Cecile, succumbed to ~ Sarah McCoy

When I was young, I grew up in a family of working-class people. Not just my parents, but my extended family, as well. ~ Matt De La Pena

Chris loved to look at every type of plant, animal, and bug he hadn't seen before on the trail and point out those he did recognize. He enjoyed walking along small streams, listening to the water as it traveled, and searching for eddies where we could watch the minnows scurry amongst the rocks. On one Shenandoah trip, while we were resting at a waterfall, eating our chocolate-covered granola bars and watching the water pummel the rocks below, he said, "See, Carine ? That's the purity of nature. It may be harsh in its honesty, but it never lies to you".

Chris seemed to be most comfortable outdoors, and the farther away from the typical surroundings and pace of our everyday lives the better. While it was unusual for a solid week to pass without my parents having an argument that sent them into a negative tailspin of destruction and despair, they never got into a fight of any consequence when we were on an extended family hike or camping trip. It seemed like everything became centered and peaceful when there was no choice but to make nature the focus. Our parents' attention went to watching for blaze marks on trees ; staying on the correct trail ; doling out bug spray, granola bars, sandwiches, and candy bars at proper intervals ; and finding the best place to pitch the tent before nightfall. They taught us how to properly lace up our hiking boots and wear the righ socks to keep our feet healthy and reliable. They showed us which leaves were safe to use as toilet pape ~ Carine McCandless

Then my extended family, there are preachers and evangelists, former priests. So I have quite a bit of history with Church, religion and spirituality. ~ Wes Bentley

I came from a huge extended family of musicians. ~ Jake Epstein

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family. ~ Rebecca West

As engine vibrated under him, he tried to tell himself it was all going to work out. It had to. Now that he'd found The One, there was no way in hell he was letting her get away. If that meant he had to move heaven and earth to find a good life for her and her pack mates here in the city, he'd do it. If being with Jayna meant he had to empty out his bank account and sell everything he owned, he was okay with that too.

He had friends in other places he could turn to, Family too. His parents owned a huge house and a lot of land outside of Denver. If he showed up with Jayna, her pack, and no job, his family would welcome them with open arms. Okay, maybe his mom would be a little shocked when she found out his girlfriend came with an extended family, but she'd overlook it if there was a possibility of a grandchild in the near future.

Becker was still daydreaming about kids with Jayna someday when headlights suddenly appeared in his rear- view mirror. He glanced over, swearing when he saw two vehicles speeding up behind him and closing fast. ~ Paige Tyler

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile.
WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given ~ Marilyn French

But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. ~ Susan Sontag

I had dreamed of visiting Bali for many years and because I had an extended family of Balinese friends in Los Angeles, I felt connected. The island is so peaceful and the smiles are constant. ~ Carolyn Murphy

Its almost Thanksgiving! A day when you get to hear your extended family use racial slurs for groups are not taking away their jobs. ~ Jen Kirkman

Corporations found out that without a healthy culture, people are not natural Marxists but natural couch potatoes. With no extended family, no effective church, and no healthy local community to support their lives, people don't form revolutionary cells: they buy a case of beer or renew their Xanax prescription and spend their non-working hours watching NFL games and the Lifetime network and various types of pornography. ~ Gene Callahan

Mom and Dad were killed in a car accident on their way home from the tournament." Mr. Terupt's eyes were moist, but he kept going. "Fortunately, I was headed to college, which was the best place for me. Wrestling saved my life. The challenge it provided kept me going when I could have easily given up. I have no brothers or sisters, or any other extended family, so I was alone after my parents died. You saw that last year at the hospital. But now I have all of you. Sometimes answers come at unexpected times, in unexpected ways and unexpected places. I never ~ Rob Buyea

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. ~ James Lee Burke

But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch? ~ Yann Martel

Selling your house, giving away possessions, working multiple jobs for a period of time, going back to school and moving in with friends or relatives, sharing a car with your partner and riding your bike more, investing all your savings in a new venture, living on the other side of the world for a year - your friends may not understand, your co-workers may not get it, your extended family may think you've lost your mind - that's okay. Better to receive some odd looks and have a few people roll their eyes than spend your days wondering, What if I did that . . . ? Take that step. Make that leap. Try that new thing. If it helps clarify your ikigai, if it gets you up in the morning, if it's good for you and the world, do it. ~ Rob Bell

The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting ~ Gertrude Stein

Black women's feelings of responsibility for nurturing the children in their own extended family networks have stimulated a more generalized ethic of care where black women feel accountable to all the black community's children. ~ Patricia Hill Collins

No matter how you feel about your extended family or family gatherings you will be attending. This is because now the ultimate reason for attending family gatherings is for your children to have the time of their lives with their cousins. Little kids love their cousins. I'm not being cute or exaggerating here. Cousins are like celebrities for little kids. If little kids had a People magazine, cousins would be on the cover. Cousins are the barometers of how fun a family get-together will be. Are the cousins going to be there? Fun! ~ Jim Gaffigan

We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind. To do so effectively, the world needs a global ethic with values which give meaning to life experiences and, more than religious institutions and dogmas, sustain the non-material dimension of humanity. Mankind's universal values of love, compassion, solidarity, caring and tolerance should form the basis for this global ethic which should permeate culture, politics, trade, religion and philosophy. It should also permeate the extended family of the United Nations. ~ Wangari Maathai

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people. ~ Antal Szerb

Whatever your methods, your point about drugs must be made. If you're lucky enough to have a heroin addict in your extended family, you can always park him at the threshold of your child's bedroom door for a few hours right before bed time. It's much more effective than those car crash docudramas that are supposed to keep kids from drinking and driving, and it's free; unless you have to buy the heroin to get the guy to do it. It's a tough love kind of solution, but I got over it and so will your kid. ~ Gordon Vivace

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe. ~ Stanislav Grof

Why do you always call me by my full name?"
"I don't know. I guess that's how I think of you in my head."
"Oh, so you're saying you think about me a lot?"
I laugh. "No, I'm saying that when I think about you, which isn't very often, that's how I think of you. On the first day of school, I always have to explain to teachers that Lara Jean is my first name and not just Lara. And then, do you remember how Mr. Chudney started calling you John Ambrose because of that? 'Mr. John Ambrose.'"
In a fake hoity-toity English accent, John says, "Mr. John Ambrose McClaren the Third, madam."
I giggle. I've never met a third before. "Are you really?"
"Yeah. It's annoying. My dad's a junior, so he's JJ, but my extended family still calls me Little John." He grimaces. "I'd much rather be John Ambrose than Little John. Sounds like a rapper or that guy from Robin Hood."
"Your family's so fancy." I only ever saw John's mom when she was picking him up. She looked younger than the other mothers, she had John's same milky skin, and her hair was longer than the other moms', straw-colored.
"No. My family isn't fancy at all. My mom made Jell-O salad last night for dessert. And, like, my dad only has steak cooked well-done. We only ever take vacations we can drive to. ~ Jenny Han

The erosion of extended family concept and losing out on values are the two things that are primarily responsible for the growing mismatch in the parent-child relationship. ~ Shiv Khera

In Omaha, we were part of the largest African American extended family in Nebraska. In Pleasanton, we would be the chocolate chip in the cookie. ~ Gabrielle Union

Boys get unfairly labeled as morally defective, hyperactive, undisciplined, or 'problem children,' when quite often the problem is not with the boys but with the families, extended families, or social environments, which do not understand their specific needs as human beings and as boys ~ Michael Gurian

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? ... The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When moms stayed home, it was easier just to let the kids play around the house. But as women entered the workplace and the extended family dissolved, someone else had to pick up the slack on the child-care front. Extracurricular activities fit the bill perfectly, promising not only supervision but also enrichment. ~ Carl Honore

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

My mother, as a girl, had remembered this woman from Maine, someone who was part of the extended family somehow, and I recall her talking about this great, risk-taking woman. There are the most amazing, heroic stories in everybody's lives. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. ~ Tom Stoppard

Because we had no other relatives living in the U.K., me, my parents and my siblings continuously journeyed abroad to bond with our extended family. ~ Anton Du Beke

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past. ~ Tracy Letts

What makes me the happiest are the times I get together with my family, those times when I am with my children, grandchildren, my brothers and sisters and my very close friends, as well as when I am with my extended family in each one of my lectures and power journeys. My greatest joy is just to be alive! ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine.
Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been. ~ Mariama Ba

Don't you have a girlfriend or family you'd rather be with? (Geary)
Only Solin, and honestly, he's not this soft. Even if he was, it'd be gross. (Arik) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Do you feel that? It is a calm shift in the wind.
Do you hear that? It is a soft whisper of hope.
Do you see that? It is the divine hand of guidance, mercifully extended to aid our good fight. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

No!" She headed back to her tent. "Leave me, dragon. I never want to see you, or your family, again. Ever!"
Danelin glanced at Brastias. "Family?"
"Don't ask."
The dragon silently watched Annwyl's retreating form. He began chanting and flame surrounded him. That's when Brastias wondered if he would die this day. The flames grew, enveloping the beast, but eventually the flames died away, leaving a very large, very naked man.
With a growl, he followed after Annwyl, disappearing into the tent after her.
"So they can shape-shift then?" Danelin asked quietly.
"Seems so."
"Should we go after him?"
Brastias looked at Danelin. It took him awhile, but he'd finally figured out what he'd just witnessed. A lover's quarrel. Leave it to Annwyl. ~ G.A. Aiken

Much of our Fear, is based in the fear of loss. We fear losing our own lives. We fear death for our family and friends. We fear the loss of our means of survival. In the Western World that's tied up in the way we make money to support ourselves and families. In many parts of the World, it's more basic: food and water. We fear violence, oppression. We fear others. ~ Steve Bivans

When you come from a family of storytellers, you're doomed. You just have to tell stories. ~ Patricia Polacco

My family is my biggest critic. Since they come from a non-filmi background, they give me an audience's point of view. They have been very supportive of me. ~ Randeep Hooda

Our economic policies are undermining our future. The promise of the American dream was that if you worked hard, you could make it into the middle class. If we don't raise the minimum wage, provide affordable daycare and universal pre-K, and mandate paid family medical leave and equal pay for equal work, we are allowing that dream to fade away. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand

Maybe he, like me,
is engaged in the kind of unspoken rebellion
you don't want to perform too brightly
since you're never certain
anyone in your family will notice
your darkened eyes, skeleton shoes, tousled hair,
patchy attendance record.
You may be sacrificing body and soul
on a ghostly battlefield, fighting across a divide
seen by no one
but you. ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

When he had accompanied his father on drumming errands he noticed how high caste men and women treated them as inferior. They had to enter from the back door and wait near the kitchen or at a side veranda and sit on low benches or reed mats. They were never offered a decent seat. At meals times they were never invited to eat at the main table with the family or other guests. Instead, they had to eat the food served to them on the reed mat. This they ate in silence while the patrons sat at a lavishly laid table and enjoyed their food amidst chat and cheer. ~ Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth
that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence
for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage. ~ Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

Dear Papa, it seemed, had not left his family in affluent circumstances; but he had certainly endowed them with good looks, a commodity in which they had been bred from earliest youth to trade to the best advantage. ~ Georgette Heyer

One student asks: Why should I live?

Steven Pinker answers: In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy - the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness - and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, a ~ Steven Pinker

Thankfully, I have never experienced a miscarriage, but I have friends and family who have, and I've talked to them about their feelings. ~ Neve McIntosh

Grateful I choose to see the good in others; friends, family or strangers. Instead of judging me on my past mistakes, try also learning of all the great things I've done before you think you know who I am. ~ Jennifer Parcus

Families necessitate energetic concealment of the obvious, to be plain about it. To be in a family is to work strenuously to suppress the truth, for reasons I cannot determine, and the shadow, when it came, caused competing strategies in the family I occupied. ~ Ben Marcus

Adora you're not telling the truth. Go back to your husband and pay gross devotion to your marriage and family. Edochie is an angel. Only agberos would watch football and transfer aggression to their wives, not a captain. ~ S.A. David

Open her heart to me, please, God. After the mess I've made of things, I can't do this on my own. ~ Karen Kingsbury

I come from a musical family. Mom was a piano teacher for a large portion of her life, and Dad is a saxophone hobbyist who grew up in England during the heyday of Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott. I started taking piano lessons from my Mom, but it's too easy to slack off with your parent, so she passed me on to a friend of hers, where I got more motivated to play music by playing pop hits and TV themes. I did some classical training, but I was always more into the really thematic stuff. ~ Gerard Cox

When I look around at this 'normal' life you're so eager to leave, I don't see boring or predictable - I see friends who love you and a family that would make any sacrifice for your happiness. I see the kind of security I've never had and always wanted. I may have given you access to the world I know best, but you and your family have given me a world that doesn't exist on a map. ~ Tamara Ireland Stone

I come from a poor family, so really, the culture I know best is the street, TV, school. ~ Maiwenn

My friends will help me stay grounded, and so will my family. ~ Rowan Blanchard

I have a day job, which means my family isn't dependent on the writing income. So if I have an idea I like, I write it. ~ Jim C. Hines

The long neck that extended from his stiff collar. ~ Lois Lowry