471 Quotes About Families

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with.

Some families are an odd melting pot of strangers with the occasional offering of obligation.

Family' is not just a biological word, it's an an operative one.

We are all bounded with each other on the basis of our beliefs and values; when we question those values, we are certainly left alone, away from our families, friends and the dear one. And that is a cost benefit analysis we all make and we keep satisfying ourselves with the status quo of situations.

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other. The happiest families I ever met were all frayed... but they were also tighter than a hangman's noose.

It’s easy being the Enlightened One about other people’s families.

Families are a trip,” says Lee. “You think you know them so well that you stay wrong about each other.”It’s true.“It wasn’t until I lived on my own that my mom and dad became these other people to me,” she says.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?