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b959cdb Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people. family-relationships inspirational Leslye Walton
2a8f51f As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time. family-relationships parents-and-children Neil Gaiman
fb5dfdc And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again... family-relationships Ray Bradbury
f37408f I don't feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don't clarify, I don't doubt, I don't worry. I don't tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can. family-relationships trust family love sibling-bond sibling-relationships unconditional-love sister brothers siblings family-love twins sisters loyalty Gillian Flynn
2b38ece Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. god is a masked Death. family-relationships hatred unhappiness injustice marriage women death disparity domestic-life false-belief lovelessness scorn unfreedom disharmony families preconceptions discord married-life worldliness idolatry decay demons matrimony force social-norms society hypocrisy disgust contempt vice expectations Charlotte Brontë
cb50b92 She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't. family-relationships sisters James Baldwin
22266cd Ian, man, I didna tell ye because I didna wish to lose you too. My brother was gone, and my father. I didna mean to lose my own heart's blood as well. For you are dearer to me even than home and family, love.'She cast a lopsided smile at Jamie. 'And that's saying quite a bit. family-relationships romance Diana Gabaldon
4d712f0 When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing. family-relationships motherhood family babies mothers mothering children childhood Rebecca Solnit
a18474b Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents and young children, but in the best situations, there should be no power struggles by the time those children have become adults - just deep connection, trust, and respect between people who sincerely care about each other. In disruptive families, children are taught to remain one-up or one-down into adulthood. And this produces immature adults who either seek to dominate others (one-up) or who allow themselves to be dominated (one-down) in their relationships - one powerful and one needy, one enabling and one addicted, one decisive and one confused. In relationships with these people, manipulation abounds. Especially when they start to feel out of control. family-relationships abusive counseling disfunction enable enabling codependency manipulation control power psychology Tim Clinton
ad0442f Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. family-relationships Ann Patchett
1254afb "What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily." (Quoted from by Elizabeth von Arnim)" family-relationships family-saga shell-seekers Rosamunde Pilcher
b590b07 The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. family-relationships neighbors G.K. Chesterton
7375243 I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise? family-relationships motherhood family coming-of-age mothers Rebecca Solnit
80082cc Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was -- her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth -- she wasn't the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn't what she'd made herself out to be -- a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn't have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister. family-relationships sibling-relationships siblings Jennifer Weiner
4a50286 When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. family-relationships war inspiration family love soldiers Ian McEwan
ea01b7d It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations.... family-relationships motherhood Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1cadf71 My father used to say there are two kinds of people: the noticers and the noticed family-relationships family-drama survival-story suspense Lori Lansens
96f6d32 It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind. family-relationships india literary-fiction immigration drama suspense Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
ae91c9f Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness. I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty. family-relationships poverty family coming-of-age parents Rebecca Solnit
1e6e565 Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do. family-relationships growing-up parenting Sebastian Faulks
d29e96b mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players. family-relationships humour human-frailties memoir David Sedaris
c61cf30 "The pure menace radiating from my younger sister is undeniable. She can hate me, but I need her to know that she has something that Stella never did: a place to fall. "And if he hurts you or if anyone hurts you...you have me." It feels unnatural, but I hug my sister. Her arms are limp at her sides, but she doesn't push me away. "Remember, you have me," I repeat." family-relationships young-adult sibiling-bonding pushing-the-limits novella Katie McGarry
0263858 In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent. family-relationships indian-fiction literary-fiction immigration mystery Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
fb43a76 Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible. family-relationships india immigrant-experience literary-fiction usa suspense Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
31e40f0 "My desolation was that no one knew me and I did not know myself. My family's life was my life. I knew nothing else. I was clothed, fed, given a bed to sleep in, encouraged to marry early and rich, and loved in a generic way -- I was "the big one," which meant the older and my sister was the 'little one" --but no one spoke to me, no one explained anything." family-relationships Natalie Goldberg
7512d14 "Your mother would break my pate if she knew how I risked you." "Father," Myste replied like a sun, "all children must be risked. Mother knows that. How else are we to discover ourselves?" King Jose and Myste (p. 908)" family-relationships risk growth Stephen R. Donaldson
8dc5c1a "Can I sleep with you?" asked Oz. "Kinda scary in my room. Pretty sure I saw a troll in the corner." Lou said, "Get up here." Oz climbed next to her. Oz suddenly looked troubled. "When you get married, who am I going to come get in bed with when I'm scared, Lou?" "One day you're gonna get bigger than me, then I'm going to be running to you when I get scared." family-relationships inspirational sister Baldacci David
58e4010 At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past. family-relationships wheat William Maxwell
1a20f16 I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person. family-relationships the-corrections jonathan-franzen growing-up parents parents-and-children Jonathan Franzen
3a9c5f4 Just imagine how it must feel to know that your family won't be going to heaven with you- I mean, truly believing that. We're ghosts to him. We might a well be dead. family-relationships religious-faith religious-extremism Douglas Coupland
4c4d50a When you get older, you think of sadness in a different way. You don't judge it so harshly. family-relationships sadness Lori Lansens
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