It’s very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you’re not perfect.

Mom always said too much chocolate is like having too much love—you can’t get enough-Geraldine Solon, Chocolicious

Just be happy. And if you can’t be happy, do things that make you happy. Or do nothing with people that make you happy.

Human interaction. The most complicated form of happiness I will never figure out.

…we should be grateful for them because without our family—the ancestors we descend from, the cousins we see once a year, the loves our lives we see every day—life is pretty boring.

We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion.We are the family of God.

You don’t turn your back on family, even when they do.

From the ages of 8-18, me and my family moved around a lot. Mostly we would just stretch, but occasionally one of us would actually get up to go to the fridge.

I had to hand it to him, leaving the empty glove lying on the bed was an apt metaphor for love. Two things I can say about my grandpa are that he is wise, and...

Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of...

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

Under this aura of perfection he knows how flawed he really is but his intact denial system keeps this awareness suppressed in the far recesses of his mind.

I think LOVE. Love is what brings families together, and love is often what drives them apart. Love can act as both a fuel and an exterminator for fire, a cause of war, but also...

Of all the gifts you can get, friends and family are the best!

…I also have an extended family. The people who stayed. The people who became more than friends; the people who open the door when I knock. That’s what it all boils down to. The people...

Yes. Apparently they are.

I think I just inhaled a cloud shaped like the ghost of my grandpa, and all I have to say is grandma smelled better.

Because of the age difference, I assumed they were related, mother/daughter. But they weren’t. They were father/son/possible lovers.

I’ll mark up my services 200%, and then offer them to you at a 50% discount—because I like you so much. That’s the Mother-in-law Discount.

My son’s name will be Sonya, like his mother, whose name will be Dadya.

The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all its accumulated experience to guide us. We need context, we need...

Families are weird. You’d think that people who live and eat and sleep in the same place would always have a lot in common. But sometimes they don’t have anything in common AT ALL. You...

There’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.

The trouble with cousins, Lizabeth thought, was that they knew all about you, even your allergies.

My parents’ work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going – to keep me going. I realized that, although...

Family is in essence a small nation, and the nation a large family. In treating his own family with dignity, a ruler learns to govern his nation with dignity

Gran runs her fingers through my hair, smiling down at me. I’m to weak to reach up and trace her laugh lines, but I trace them with my eyes, thinking of all the years that...

Certain women because of their female power and seductiveness could bring destruction to a family.

It is not by blood, anyhow, that man’s true continuity is established: Alexander’s direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue,...

Whoa, that’s the kind of little sister I can dig!” said Edison.”Yes, we’re all alike,” I said. “We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your...

Leah: I want those gubs Mommy.Kate: They’re not ‘gubs’ they’re ‘gloves’Aaden and Leah try and say glovesLeah: Gloves!Kate: Good job!Aaden: Gubs!Kate: No

When you make a commitment, you build trust. when you keep it, you build trust.

Those who care about me will forget me but, those who love me will never let go of me.

I’m sure it’s not any wish of mine that I’m born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I’d be born the lowest and coarsest-minded...

I hope this book will inspire the kitchen con-artist in you, increase fruit and veggie consumption in your family, and motivate you to become an Accidental Cook. Pass it on!

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

Remember,even if we can’t see them, those we love are always with us.

I pause to catch my breath, looking around at all the toys he’s paid for and never once enjoyed with his son.

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends,...

What if all I’d ever known was how it had been for the past three years – me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might...

I came to this house for safety. They came because the foster care system ran out of homes. We stayed because we were stray pieces of other puzzles, tired of never fitting.

As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We’re not specially courageous, we’re just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a...

Our family was starting. We kept on moving with our young lives, shortly afterward and took Ben Young with us everywhere. But pretty soon Pegi started noticing that Ben was not doing the things some...

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

When I recall memories, it all seems like a film, not a reality.

In two words,” said Alan quietly, “there is nothing I love half as much as you.

Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the...

My own family were far from perfect, yet I thanked the Lord that I had them, even if they did sometimes make me want to kill them all.

So that’s how you’re going to fix the family problem. Little Dragomirs. Good idea.

You are the machos, the life, the future of our families. You are all that’s left, so you must protect our mothers and grow and do good and have families of your own. I love...