7,080 Quotes About Family

With more time spent in their mother's presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie's own facile mental questioning and creative drive, paired with her physical rigidity, all the more oppositional, and, how they dance around serious subjects, laughable.

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.

A thousand happy moments succumbed to history. It was the happiest hour of the year, worst time of our lives. I can still smell the ruins from that cold dark brute stormy October night.

There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again

She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be understood.But what did the volume of words matter in any language when she couldn't even manage to ask the simplest questions? Will you tell me your story? Will you let me in to my own family? Isn't it my story, too?

He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.

Your identity should not be fully defined by what you do, by being a manager, a wife, a mother of children or a computer programmer

Digging through my roots to understand the way my branches grew.

The American family shattered for the simple reason that it was American, not global.