Agatha told me she was late, and I thought, I haven’t slept with her in years—she really must be late. I’m going to be a father!

A mafia don could snap his fingers and somebody would snap my neck. But when I snap my fingers, people start dancing. Or at least my clones would.

I’m world famous. Throughout the globe—north, south, east, and west—there are literally four people who know my name. It’s great to have all four grandparents still living, and widely dispersed around the world.

When I have children I want an even number of boys and girls, and that’s why I want 15 kids—7 boys, 7 girls, and one hermaphrodite named Sam.

A person’s favorite word is brother, because he or she can relate to it. I love it because we value most in life the things we do not have.

Out of all the fathers in the world, I am the most like Mother Theresa. Also, I am childless.

It’s a messy business–being alive. But I’d rather have this short time with those I love than have an easy time. We forget about the things we saw that morning,and we choose to build a...

To last, a marriage and family must be built on love—love for God, and love for one another.

Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children....

Why is it that people talk about death, as if it is a part of life, when it is entirely separate? Someone passes on into the never ending void, where the living aren’t allowed. We...

…he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble...

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

To achieve the impossible, you must attempt the absurd

Families are designed to nurture the minds, wills, and emotions of its members so that the barriers created by fear of the unknown can be replaced by the confidence that comes from knowing you are...

It’s hard when you’re missing your family. You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs.

hot afternoonthe squeak of my handson my daughter’s coffin

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...

Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.

…Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo...

There is no greater treasure than a husband who models godliness before his wife and children on a daily basis.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree……unless that tree’s growing on top of a hill.

It is the mess that readers love. The fact that sometimes the people who love us the most aren’t people we’re related to, but people who join our family later. The book acknowledges how difficult...

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...

And what about tomorrow then? And all the tomorrows to come? Why can’t we talk about it? Why can’t we ever talk about it?

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied...

I don’t think my journey has to be harrowing to be important. Simply doing the tasks of the day is enough. Such as getting up every morning to go to work to support my family...

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...

It was a family joke that Lydia’s domestic tendencies were somehow misplaced when she was created.

These people make my family look easy to get along with.

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis...

Granted, not all uneducated women are prostitutes, and, not all prostitutes are uneducated. However, where building a family is employment, an uneducated woman’s womb is her diploma.

No man can protect you like your father, No women can love you like your mother.

I wonder whether my love would be divided up more between him and Mama if I’d had him for longer, but I don’t think so. I think we stretch out forever in our hearts.

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.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

Without love, life was nothing but endless tasks and battles.

No parent should have to bury a child … No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things.I buried my...

Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the...

Someone said that once a family producers a writer, that’s the end of the family.

A woman’s endurance enabled your first breath.

They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else–the cold, and where he’d go in it–was outside, for a while anyway.

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats–“Who’s that trip-tapping across my bridge!?”–and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your...

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...

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don’t chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages.

You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.

God helps everything come to pass. However, he reminds us that nothing comes to stay.

It is hundreds of tiny threads of memories, which sew people together through the years. Despite, their mental separation they stay woven into that tapestry out of habit, emotion, obsession or fear.

It has been said that as goes the family, so goes the world. It can also be said that as goes the father, so goes the family.