Family Stories Quotes

There were so many stories about Bing's daughter living in sin. We weren't hurting anyone. We were living in love. I couldn't understand why people were trying to hurt us and hurt our families. ~ Mary Crosby

I'm known for impressions and family stories. ~ Jay Pharoah

Perserverance ... that's been the story of my family. ~ Barry Goldwater

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along. ~ Karen Chamberlain

You never find yourself involved in a single action story. Your family is always being with you. And you cannot separate whatever is going on in your life with your relationship with your son, with your wife ... ~ Jose Padilha

I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all. ~ Sissy Spacek

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

Christopher, family for me was never blood. It was always the family I chose. But it turns out it's nice to have someone I'm related to in this world. Someone I can tell boring family stories to. Do you know about Will Herondale? Or James Herondale?"
"I don't think so," said Kit.
"Excellent. Hours of your time will be ruined," said Jace. ~ Cassandra Clare

Hey everyone. This is Elizabeth Stone, the one who wrote a A BOY I ONCE KNEW and BLACK SHEEP AND KISSING COUSINS. To those of you who read either one, thanks! But another Elizabeth Stone, not me, wrote WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION and VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. Just setting the record straight! ~ Elizabeth Stone

In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of
in her perfect phrase - extreme reading. The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious. This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal) history and identity. ~ Susan Stinson

My stories are fundamentally about the love of family. ~ Patricia Polacco

I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories. ~ Daniel Woodrell

My appearances are almost theatrical performances. I bring items for the children to see, such as photographs and actual piece of meteorite, a family quilt, sometimes spectacles, sometimes clothing, so that they can understand what I write about is family stories based in fact. ~ Patricia Polacco

For a child, the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.' ~ Luanne Rice

More often than not, family stories turn out to be etched in sand rather than granite. Even the parts we think are true - even the parts about ourselves - crumble ~ Diane Chamberlain

The table is the number one place we pass on family stories and it's the knowledge of where your family came from that helps build self-esteem and resiliency in kids. When we stop having dinners, we stop passing on those stories. And, of course, when you make food at home you actually know what's in the food you are eating. It is the healthiest, greenest thing you can do! ~ Laurie David

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder. ~ Edward P. Jones

In my family, telling stories is just a way of life. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty. ~ Margaret George

Stories
individual stories, family stories, national stories
are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. ~ Yann Martel

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories - Mother's in particular - how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

There was an especially deep bond between the eldest and the youngest. Enza and Stella were the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the bookends that held all the family stories from start to finish as well as the various shades and hues of personality and temperament. ~ Adriana Trigiani

These secrets came down my own ornately curved and twisting family line. For family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true. ~ Liz Rosenberg

Hat the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage. ~ Ellen Goodman

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

I love writing family stories. ~ Larry Wilmore

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art. ~ Erica Jong

I found a photo of Mom standing between Mick and Dad, who were both wearing basketball uniforms. Mom was perfectly groomed, of course, and looking very ladylike. I said I must have been adopted. Ma-ma-oo laughed and said that when Mom was a little girl, she was always doing things like tying two cookie sheets to her shoes and attempting to ski because she'd seen one of her movie star idols in a magazine, elegantly poised on the slopes of Switzerland. Mom flew down the hill, hit a bump and crashed into a bush. She broke her leg and earned the nickname "Crash. ~ Eden Robinson

I think that's actually what draws me to family stories: the various roles we each play with each member of our families, and how different they can be from who we are with our friends and partners and lovers. I'm endlessly fascinated by how we navigate these family dynamics; they are the dramas each of us live out day after day, often in ways we don't even realize. ~ Christopher Castellani

Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories? ~ Stephenie Meyer

I have always kept my personal relationships pretty private, whether it's intimate or my family or friends - at least in videos. It's always been something that I've sworn off from sharing online. ~ Tyler Oakley

A Crime So Monstrous is a remarkably brave and unflinching piece of reportage and storytelling. Ben Skinner bears witness, sharing stories so unsettling, so neglected, so chilling they will leave you shaking with anger. This should be required reading for policy makers around the world - and, for that matter, anyone concerned about the human condition. ~ Alex Kotlowitz

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of it's very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can't-I don't have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened.
She says, "Yes, there are lives sadder than the saddest of books." I say, "Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life. ~ Agota Kristf

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes.
If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt.
[ ... ]
If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.
If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them. ~ Karen Blixen

The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature. ~ Dorothy Parker

When people speak of great men, they think of men like Napoleon - men of violence. Rarely do they think of peaceful men. But contrast the reception they will receive when they return home from their battles. Napoleon will arrive in pomp and in power, a man who's achieved the very summit of earthly ambition. And yet his dreams will be haunted by the oppressions of war. William Wilberforce, however, will return to his family, lay his head on his pillow and remember: the slave trade is no more. ~ Charles Fox

I thought about the afterlife and wondered if people shared death stories. If so, i'd have the coolest story ever. You died in your sleep? Drunk driver? Cancer, huh? World War 2? Well... yeah, those deaths are great and all, but wit till I tell you what happened to me. Yeah... that's right... I said a kraken. ~ Colleen Houck

The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that? ~ Michael Chabon

I calculate the breadth of Steven's shoulders, now wider than mine;
watch him tear open the Blokus game he likes to play with me after school;
count the hours between now and Dad coming home to take over
and I am only a little afraid
of the night. ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible. You had to be a fat busy Victorian family to expand enough to fill up basements and passages and conservatives and attics. You had to have an army of bootboys and nurses and parlourmaids. You had to have a complicated greedy system of living that used up plenty of space and people and just in the daily business of eating and sleeping and keeping clean. You had to multiply your requirements and your possessions, activate that panel of bells in the kitchen - Drawing-Room and Master Bedroom and Library - keep going a spiral of needs and people to satisfy the needs. if you did not, if you contracted into three people without such needs, then a house like this became a dinosaur, occupying too much air and ground and demanding to be fed new sinks and drainpipes and a sea of electricity. Such a house became a fossil, stranded among neighbours long since chopped up into flats and bed-sitting-rooms, or sleek modern houses that had a suitable number of rooms for correct living in the late twentieth century. It and its kind, stood awkwardly on the fringes of a city renowned for old and beautiful buildings: they were old, and unbeautiful. ~ Penelope Lively

All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck - books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you're reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles. ~ Mario Batali

One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach! ~ Camron Wright

If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it's very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic. ~ Andrew Greeley

as if this tragedy marked the end of the family. And perhaps it did. And perhaps it did not. ~ E. Lockhart

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. ~ Frank Yerby

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family. ~ Philippa Gregory

Son or daughter are not yours if you want to go to moksha (ultimate liberation). If you want to remain in the worldly life, then son and daughter are yours. ~ Dada Bhagwan

It is likely that human beings will find fulfillment and will be rewarded for the same qualities that they have been rewarded for for 5,000 years. And that is intelligence, hard work, honesty, a sense of character, loyalty to family and friends, and above all, love and faith. If you are trying to decide what you should do, those are the things you should do. And you know it. ~ Fareed Zakaria

Film is an illusion. Fame is ephemeral. Faith and family are what endure. ~ Emilio Estevez

I never have issues in handling the fame. I was in a boarding school, as I am from a middle-class family. We didn't have a lot of money, so we all learned to respect money and understood its real value. ~ Suresh Raina

I know you all have families who love you so if you want to leave–. (Acheron)
We wouldn't be here if we didn't want to. You and Val fought to save my sister when no one else would have bothered. I haven't forgotten it. (Vane)
And I haven't forgotten what the Dark-Hunters did for me and Maggie. (Wren)
Yeah, we're family. Psychotic, bizarre and a hodgepodge of personalities that should probably never be blended, but here we are. Now let's go kick some ass. (Fury) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Good restaurant design is about achieving equilibrium between the food, service, and design - in effect, telling a complete story. ~ David Rockwell

We must rediscover the habit of thinking the best of each other ~ Michael Howard

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills. ~ John Howard Matthews

My life is like rolling the dice or better yet, flipping a coin. The question is - is it going to land on heads or tails… Or does it matter? ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways. ~ Seth Dickinson

Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue. ~ Moby

I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. ~ Susan Orlean

Do you know what my daughter's nurse told her today? "In a girl's voice lies temptation - a known fact. Eloquence in a woman means promiscuity. Promiscuity of the mind leads to promiscuity of the body." She doesn't believe it yet, but she will. She'll grow up just like her mother. Marry, raise children and honor her family. Spend her youth in needlepoint and rue the day she was born a girl. And when she dies, she'll wonder why she obeyed all the rules of God and Country for no biblical hell could ever be worse than a state of perpetual inconsequence. ~ Margaret F. Rosenthal

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago. ~ Michael Shermer

The preacher laughed softly. "You know," he said, "it's a nice thing not bein' a preacher no more. Nobody use' ta tell stories when I was there, or if they did I couldn' laugh. An' I couldn' cuss. Now I cuss all I want, any time I want, an' it does a fella good to cuss if he wants to. ~ John Steinbeck

People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do. ~ Steven Wright

I'm really close with Dave Coulier and his wife Melissa. My family and I go over there for barbeques, for dinners, Super Bowl parties. ~ Jodie Sweetin

All my freakouts have been pretty private and directed at family pets and/or people I have been dating for too short a time to freak out at in that way. ~ Lena Dunham

My stories were translated and had many reviews before I had an interview with any international or Arab newspaper. If the stories hadn't succeeded, you wouldn't have asked me my position on Arab festivals and I wouldn't have been interested in the festivals anyway, because I would be in seclusion, writing. ~ Hassan Blasim

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandon ~ Daniel Mendelsohn

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. ~ Bruce Holland Rogers

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow. ~ Francisco X. Alarcon

My favorite memory is Tomorrow. Tomorrow's family moments are what I look forward to every day. No single favorite. Just Tomorrow. ~ Nigel Barker

I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it--much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me. ~ Oscar Wilde

If I were a bad black comic I would name my special, Yo mama, and other stories of a lack of self awareness. ~ Dov Davidoff

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.

("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.