Chairs have legs. Four of them, like my father. Meow.

Shame is a powerful feeling. There is a tremendous difference between making a mistake and believing you are a mistake…If I don’t see myself as being a mistake then it is I who must take...

Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the...

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...

Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at...

I can see that.

I went to visit my grandma. I meant to stay for two days, but ended up staying two months. (So I overslept a little).

Why won’t you help me? You have to able to manage on your own.

I have sewn my own destruction, and it looks like a cat sweater. I knitted matching pants too, because that’s what lovers do. My feelings for you melted in the ice cream cone, and I’m...

Grandpa said I was speeding, but he drives as fast as a parked car, so anything that moves as fast as a statue is supersonic.

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the...

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

Elinor placed all that was astonishing in this way of acting to his mother’s account; and it was happy for her that he had a mother whose character was so imperfectly known to her, as...

There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family. She stops now. Leans over me so...

The world is full of men who want to be right, when actually the secret of a man’s strength and his pathway to true honor is his ability to admit fault when he has failed....

What can we do?” Mom asked again.I shrugged.But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came...

…it isn’t things and proximity, or even blood that holds us all together. What makes a family is love and loyalty.

Kids never want a perfect mother; they need a little love, even if that comes from a worst mother.

Value supported family and friends.

The family respects the rule of law. The family recognizes and accepts the legal right of the INS to pick up Elian. The door will be open. The family will not interfere. The family will...

My grandma loved to be on stage entertaining people. She loves to make people smile and laugh. She loves to brighten other people’s day. She often calls perfect strangers her angel, as a way of...

Dear God, Meg, you’re glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That’s so adorable.” Instead, I came off the high of that day by writing a letter to...

Marathon tidying produces a heap of garbage. At this stage, the one disaster that can wreak more havoc than an earthquake is the entrance of that recycling expert who goes by the alias of “mother.

There was a saying in our family that no one ever died; people just dried up, were hung on a hook, and conducted their affairs from there.

To raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren’t so damned important.

I could never leave,’ Pine Sap said. ‘Why?’ she asked.Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. ‘Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.

Parenthood doesn’t improve one’s character, it exposes it.

we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it’s impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even...

… In our family, if you said the words ‘I feel,’ they better be followed with ‘hungry’ or ‘cold’. Because we didn’t get personal, that’s just how it was.

Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.

You don’t pay back your parents. You can’t. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It’s a sort of entailment. Or if you don’t have children...

For while they’d stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn’t plan this...

I do not believe in God. Instead I believe in the power of Family. And occasionally, when I’m feeling optimistic, in free will. But blood is a force to be reckoned with. God for example,...

…I decided I’d changed my mind about home. Home was not Pensacola San Diego Guam or any of the other places we might have lived. In fact home wasn’t any particular place at all. Home...

It’s so important, so comforting, to have lampposts in this world who can light the way.

I’ve remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they’re actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that...

It was as though everything that mattered was encapsulated in that last moment of my blissful state of oblivion.

Danny couldn’t remember how many times he had driven down this particular stretch of highway.

Then I discovered that being related is no guarantee of love!

Becky was a weed. Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants. People went to all extremes to make them go away. They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt...

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

The family watched It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a very beautiful movie and all I could think was why didn’t they make a movie about uncle Billy?…Because he was a drunk and fat and...

What’s the best part of being in Hermes cabin?Connor: You are never lonely. I mean seriously, new kids are always coming in. So you always have someone to talk to.Travis: Or prank.Connor: Or pickpocket. One...

They may already know too much about their mother and father–nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I’ve...

No one have a perfect family, but mine is perfect for me

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat...

Stop using him, and start protecting him. I know he thinks he doesn’t need it, but sometimes he does. Sometimes we all do.

But my family I had always had a duty to love, no matter how they had wronged me.

If I loved someone, I could never let him go away from me. I would be too miserable and lonely.

Sometimes you can’t figure out the truth because you’re asking people that are emotionally or socially invested in you to be brutally honest. Often family or friends will tell you what you want to hear,...