I was so done with looking at life through the eyes of beer-drinking cheese-heads. I wanted to go on that mission trip and look through the eyes of someone from a different culture and see...

The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.

‎”All that history, the love & laughter, is designed for youth. It is what keeps the story of who we are alive from one generation to the next. It ensures our indelible mark in the...

It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.

I blinked and the images were gone. But I remembered how the laugh and the howl and the splash would ripple and echo in the stillness of our lake, and I wondered if ripples and...

Do you need anything?” she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? “Nah, I’m good.

Je n’ai gardé que d’excellents souvenirs de la maison paternelle; ce sont pour l’homme les plus précieux de tous, pourvu que l’amour et la concorde règnent un tant soit peu dans la famille. On peut...

My love is tube shaped. Don’t let your dad stick his dick in it.

We fell in love like two medium pizzas in one large stomach. I wish dad would have saved a few slices for us.

I’m people wealthy. My grandchildren have grandchildren, some of whom are even older than me.

He tried drowning himself, but he only succeeded in taking a bath. That man was my dad, and I showed him how to tie a tie—and a noose.

The day my dad left my mom and I was the second saddest day of my life. The saddest day was the next day, when he returned home.

Never underestimate the significance of the little things done out of a large heart of love.

The number of family secrets is just staggering.

It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.

Archers stood together, no matter what. Not even frilly-smelling laundry could tear them apart.

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design...

We are members of God’s family. One faith, one hope and one baptism.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

Sometimes the best families are the ones God builds using unexpected pieces of our hearts.

The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, “We’re pregnant.” I want to go around...

The best that could be left behind by any man: children who had been brought up to behave responsibly and to believe in something beyond their own self gratification. (The Americans

It means little to anybody but us. We set store by kinfolk. We’ve our troubles from time to time, but when one of us is in danger, there’ll be help from any who are around.

The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures...

The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now — look close at me so you will remember. Whatever...

They stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like...

If you live in each other’s pockets long enough, you’re related.

But this dagger – this was her first. Her favorite. The same one that had sliced off the boy’s toe on the beach and sent it rolling through the sand.

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vinesLived twelve little girls in two straight linesIn two straight lines they broke their breadAnd brushed their teeth and went to bed.They left the house...

If thou dost think of me again, O tribune, let it not be lost in thy mind that I prayed thee only for word of my people – mother, sister.

Maybe what I wanted was stupid. Maybe it wasn’t even something I could have. But, still it was mine. I didn’t think I could sacrifice my dreams, no matter how much my family meant to...

Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again – the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day and...

I did not have an opportunity to speak privately with Peter until just as he was leaving, when he handed me one of the Burns song-sheets and (with a most earnest look) told me to...

Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?” His voice was slow, drowsy.”You never did,” I said, trying to tease him. “You were more father to me than my father, but you never...

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on...

With every choice you create the life you’ll live; with every decision you design it.

Gran follows recipes by looking at picture—to the eye, delicious; to the tongue, boiled socks. Makes you wanna cry really.

It is impossible to maintain fantasy in the face of true emotional intimacy. Fantasy alienates, disconnects, and isolates people. Fantasy and cults isolate people. Fantasy is a cult. Weather that fantasy is nationalism, racism, or...

The same way minks get minks!

Your relationship with your brother will be, in many ways, the most complex and bewildering of all the interpersonal connections you will form. An older brother is both authority and peer, friend and bitter enemy,...

A question that always makes me hazy is it me or are the others crazy’Albert Einstein

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.

Sadie,” he said forlornly, “when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own...

Being related to a person doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be family and being family doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be related.

Love is always a battle.

She was few inches taller than him and when for the first time her promising eyes met with his, he knew it would be more than friendship. He was too young to name that feeling...

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we...

He is my brother,” I said. “I cannot desert him.””You can go to your own death,” William said. “Or you can survive this, bring up your children, and guard Anne’s little girl who will be...