… 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,...

Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we...

The more you talk about it, rehash it, rethink it, cross analyze it, debate it, respond to it, get paranoid about it, compete with it, complain about it, immortalize it, cry over it, kick it,...

Children only know what you teach them.

You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore… All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your...

I know I can’t tell you what it’s like to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.

What seems like the right thing to do could also be the hardest thing you have ever done in your life

For me Humanity > Country > Family > Friends > (Religion = Science). Sorry if I disappointed you, but this is what I was and I will follow my whole life.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was...

Imagine how your mom felt. Your dad was the love of her life.

Marriage is the union of two ‘I’s to form a ‘V’. Both ‘I’s have to tilt equally to make a good ‘V’. ‘I’s standing tall can never make a ‘V’.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American...

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn’t really want to eat 700 more...

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

This is so weird. They’re your brother and aunt.””No, I understand. They’re your family too.” Rhys said. “They loved you and raised you. That’s what family is, right?

By the time a man realizes that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he’s wrong.

The noise increased and came from all directions. There was no amount of reason to negotiate the void between sound and movement.

[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr][Niels] Bohr’s sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately,...

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.

Your family should be there. Your family should always be there. What does it say about you if they aren’t?

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.

That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster’s cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to...

My mother agreed to aid my abuse of alcohol but only if I promised never to tell my newly converted Mormon sister, whose identity I had stolen.

We’re all family–the only family we’ve got. It doesn’t have to be blood.

The greatest legacy a father can leave for his children before he departs is PEACE, otherwise his properties will go in PIECES sooner that he dies.

My mom and dad died, but in their place I got a house of fog that’s easy to hide my feelings in. (No smoking, please.)

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...