Family Relationships Quotes

The child is right," she announced firmly.
Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong. ~ Mary Norton

Sibling relationships are complicated. All family relationships are. Look at Hamlet. ~ Maurice Saatchi

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent. ~ Anthony Marra

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all. ~ Anne Lamott

Know what being a man's pet means. And if you're ever lucky enough to find yourself with the choice, choose the pasture. ~ Stacy Overman Morrison

No one said parenting was easy,but NO good parent has any right to give up.It is one labyrinth you can never quit because it seems too hard. ~ Gillian Duce

In God's great plan, every detail is important, even yours, even my humble little witness, even the hidden witness of those who live their faith with simplicity in everyday family relationships, work relationships, friendships. There are the saints of every day, the "hidden" saints, a sort of "middle class of holiness" to which we can all belong. ~ Pope Francis

Breathe, Emma. Now is not the time to swoon. ~ Eva Walker

She would seize every opportunity to dive into the bathroom, in a swirl of white towels, and once in there she was as hard to dislodge as a limpet from a rock. ~ Gerald Durrell

The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it. ~ Victor Hugo

It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up
Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas. ~ Cornelia Maude Spelman

Doubt is a lot like faith; A mustard's seed worth changes everything. ~ Donna Johnson

Zane sighed. Jovan and Mother were just the same. "Maybe later" meant no. ~ C.J. Milbrandt

Salsa is a way of life. Tener salsa en la vida is to fully enjoy life, by treasuring family, relationships, work, and community. ~ Juana Bordas

You can't forget how important coming together is, whether it be a mom and a son, a dad and a daughter, whether the family be ten people, or twenty people, or a million people. Dinnertime is the perfect time for that. Dinnertime is the perfect time when you can sit down, you can offer thanks to your kids for making you laugh, or to your parents for supporting you, or to a god for looking out for you, or to whomever you want. You can just close your eyes and open them again and realize that you have the opportunity everyday to change your life, or change someone else's. Dinnertime is a great time to think about that.

~ Dillon, age 22
From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012 ~ Deborah L. Halliday

like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted. ~ James Hannaham

Perhaps I am a rose-picker and a breeze-sniffer. ~ Sam Wazan

Let your boys test their wings. They may not be eagles, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't soar free. ~ C.J. Milbrandt

He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you. ~ Sheldon Lee Compton

Family are people who never earn your respect or love but demand it nevertheless. ~ Greg Keyes

Speaking generally, however, when you interact with someone else, you are doing outer work (physical time, play time, connecting time) ... as many sociologists have pointed out, this area of life used to dominate everyday existence, at a time when families sat around the fire of an evening and ate every meal together.
That's no longer true. Families today are often loose constellations. Contact is intermittent and rushed. everyone has their own space. Activity is scattered all around town, not confined to the home. Cars have made everyone mobile, but central heating may be the most powerful force in shaping modern society. ~ Deepak Chopra

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. ~ Ann Patchett

Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. ~ Trevor Noah

My Parents couldn't get me to stop drinking. The Police couldn't get me to stop drinking. The Courts couldn't get me to stop drinking. The threat of losing my job couldn't get me to stop drinking. My Wife couldn't get me to stop drinking. But when my eldest daughter was 5 years old and said, "Daddy, we don't like you when you drink!" That is when I stopped! ~ James Hauenstein

If I can send you a sign, I will. ~ Virginia Aird

In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It was about having a box in the attic or basement or attic or garage, something we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us, this is where we were last year, and this is where we'll stay, and this is where we'll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it's blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can't name because it's so new. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Adoption is grief in reverse. ~ Jody Cantrell Dyer

How did so many women get to this unhappy place of not understanding how truly "simple" men are in their requirements and how much benevolent power their wives have over them? Why did notions like assuaging "male ego" and using "feminine wiles" rocket into disrepute? How is it that so many women are angry with men in general yet expect to have a happy life married to one of them?
There are a number of reasons for this, and I believe they all revolve around the assault upon, and virtual collapse of, the values of religious morality, modesty, fidelity, chastity, respect for life, and a commitment to family and child-rearing. ~ Laura C. Schlessinger

Trust means there is no question.
If there is no question then no need for any answer,which means complete balance.
Always keep in your mind trust is the base for any kind of relationship. ~ Deshwal Sachin

Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services - some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention. ~ Malcolm Fraser

A personal journey is part of the generational relay. Live your legacy then pass it on. ~ Jo Ann V. Glim

There are all sorts of families," Tom's grandmother had remarked, and over the following few weeks Tom became part of the Casson family, as Micheal and Sarah and Derek-from-the-camp had done before him.
He immediately discovered that being a member of the family was very different from being a welcome friend. If you were a Casson family member, for example, and Eve drifted in from the shed asking, "Food? Any ideas? Or shall we not bother?" then you either joined in the search of the kitchen cupboards or counted the money in the housekeeping jam jar and calculated how many pizzas you could afford. Also, if you were a family member you took care of Rose, helped with homework (Saffron and Sarah were very strict about homework), unloaded the washing machine, learned to fold up Sarah's wheelchair, hunted for car keys, and kept up the hopeful theory that in the event of a crisis Bill Casson would disengage himself from his artistic life in London and rush home to help. ~ Hilary McKay

Families are Forever, and wondered if the slogan was meant as a promise or a threat. ~ Brady Udall

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent. ~ Junot Diaz

When two human beings get together, they're co-present, there is built into it a certain responsibility we have for each other, and when people are co-present in family relationships and other relationships, that responsibility is there. You can't just turn off a person. On the Internet, you can. ~ Neil Postman

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life. ~ Maya Angelou

The first person I knew who died was Beth March. I cried for three days. ~ A. Louise Robertson

Don't count on me to take you in because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us. ~ Anne Tyler

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

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

He was supposed to be the first man to tell her that she was beautiful and help her determine who she was before anyone had the opportunity to label her. She was supposed to be his "little girl". ~ Anais Torres

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

I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children. ~ Edwin A. Abbott

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior. Mothers cannot make children think, feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior. We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck. At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves - or within the child or the child's father, for that matter. There is never one villain in family life, although it may appear that way on the surface. ~ Harriet Lerner

It is a father's job to love his daughter in the way she needs to be loved. ~ Karin Slaughter

The blessing begins at home. ~ Taka Sande

Anyway, it was Oscar who called me to remind me that our nephew, Lydia's son Garnett, was turning eleven years old. Fuck my life. I hated that kid. He smelled like asparagus, and he sweated way too much for a healthy child; but then Garnett, given his propensity for biting teachers and catching chipmunks in the backyard only to bury them alive, was no normal kid. He was a case study for sociopathic behavior in the making. A walking, talking, farting, sweaty, odorous, chipmunk-burying cry for help. ~ Richard J. O'Brien

Family isn't blood," she said bitterly, continuing to back away. "Family is who loves you, who takes care of you. ~ Bruce Coville

Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones. ~ Andrew Solomon

If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us. ~ Will Schwalbe

There are millions of people out there who live this way, and their hearts are breaking just like mine. It's okay to say, "My kid is a drug addict or alcoholic, and I still love them and I'm still proud of them." Hold your head up and have a cappuccino. Take a trip. Hang your Christmas lights and hide colored eggs. Cry, laugh, then take a nap. And when we all get to the end of the road, I'm going to write a story that's so happy it's going to make your liver explode. It's going to be a great day. ~ Dina Kucera

Large families are communities unto their own. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Look to the past to see what the future holds. ~ Celia Conrad

We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world.

The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very dif ~ Stefan Molyneux

Family is not to who you are born;
Family is to who you love. ~ Gillian Duce

Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood. ~ DaShanne Stokes

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of ~ David Foster Wallace

Women's childhood relationships with their fathers are important to them all their lives. Regardless of age or status, women who seem clearest about their goals and most satisfied with their lives and personal and family relationships usually remember that their fathers enjoyed them and were actively interested in their development. ~ Stella Chess

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love? ~ Susie Bright

How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof,
Or fares, or one thing or another,
How we had days to spend under our parents' roof;
Myself, my sister, and my brother.
All five of us will die; to reckon from the past
This flesh and blood is unforgiving.
What's hard is that just one of us will be the last
To bear it all and go on living. ~ Vikram Seth

Dad was the glue to the broken pieces of our family. ~ Joanie Chevalier

Scorned and torn, former love mates aim and shoot childish devastating daggers that penetrate beyond target to pierce the heart of their offspring. ~ T.F. Hodge

History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill ~ Ron Mayes

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? ~ Alice Sebold

Kat looked down at her lemonade. 'Do you think he betrayed the love of his life ... because of us?'
'She used the name Romani, Kat,' was Gabrielle's answer. 'And besides ... ' She let the words draw out. Her gaze went to the distance, and there was a sense of peace in the way she said, 'WE'RE the love of his life.' She raised her glass again. 'To family. ~ Ally Carter

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

I am an alien in my own family; the society where I live considers me as a "nerd" and "strange. ~ Sahara Sanders

Family is a permanent adhesive that creates a lifetime bond. ~ Conrad Brooks

Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles. ~ John Gray

You daughter is prudish?" There was a gleam of triumph in Helena Winter's face. Fee grimaced. Prudish? No, not that she could claim. Far too mild a word for what she felt. ~ Mary Brock Jones

Aw honey. Today's as important as forever." Grandpa Joe in "Shave and a Haircut" Flash Warden and Other Stories ~ Eileen Granfors

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.

I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Family, friends and relationships are the blessings of the God. They are the best way to access God. ~ Amit Ray

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand. ~ Earl B. Russell

Our worth comes from the promises we keep. ~ Sunanda J. Chatterjee

Nan is the mortar that holds the tiles of their family together. ~ Wm. Paul Young

Because deep down you know that someone needs to keep you out of trouble. ~ Mike L. Hopper

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do. ~ Sebastian Faulks

If you remember yourself, you will remember me. I am always a part of you. I am your mother. ~ Emma Michaels

Live today. You never know when tomorrow will be a day too late. ~ Rochelle Carlton

I suppose men, even myself, are perpetually boys. The sons of parents who provide the staples of what makes up a life - a home, an example of what it means to be human, however fucked up that may be. We are molded by impressions and an example, single days that stick out, and wounds that split us open and never close. We take on other people's pain and sometimes make them ours. ~ M. Spio

After running from pursuers a good part of my life, I was used to hiding in the shadows. But now, I was trying to save myself from the ultimate bully, my murderous father. ~ David Crow

I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph. ~ Gloria Steinem

I could barely even say Will's name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I'd loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it? ~ Jojo Moyes

Families can also be divided into subgroups with different values, perspectives, and and communication styles, even if a subgroup consists of only one individual. ~ David Bedrick

Husband and wife are like a pair of scissors, joined together for life but always moving in opposite directions. If anyone comes in between, they join together and cut them off. ~ Hare Krishna Chandrasekaran

We co-existed in peaceful detachment ~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

For all their jokes and quirks and frustrating mannerisms, he loved them. It was what family was about - forgiving each other's transgressions, showing remorse for things done wrong, and above all, accepting one another even with their imperfections. ~ Jennifer LeBlanc

...we're not eighteen anymore. We've lived. We've created things that last – things of joy, and things of burden. ~ Dianna Hardy

I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise? ~ Rebecca Solnit

This temper had been passed down from his father, and his father in turn before that. Parents breed parrots. Only exceptional offspring grow their own bright plumage, capable of penetrating the dull grey down in which they are born covered. ~ David Whitehouse

If it hadn't been for my parents, I'd have thought soul mates were a lie. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

They say family's first, but family is the first to get you hurt ~ Chrisper Malamsha

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place. ~ Jeno Marz

A sweet kiss on her head made her little heart swell; she had pancakes, her dog. She had love. All was well. ~ Renata Bowers

You married into the family. You have to love me. It's a contractual obligation. ~ Julia Quinn

Mindfulness won't ensure you'll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won't enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I do come from a very close family. And I'm fascinated, in particular, with family relationships and the relationships that we all form with friends who feel as close, if not closer, than family. ~ John Corey Whaley

You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness. ~ Elaine Castillo