Families Quotes

“They look at you odd. They say why don’t you do something? I HAVE done everything possible. It does occupy your mind, but like anything painful, you push it to one side. It’s in the bottom compartment; it comes out every so often. If I knew he was dead, I could grieve.”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“It’s tough. When my own son goes out, it’s natural to worry, but I get really paranoid. I worry that something’s going to happen, or he’s going to go missing when he goes out. I’m very protective of him.”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“I knew something was wrong the minute he didn’t come home,’ says Jo. ‘He always rang. Always.
Jo is adamant he would have found a way to call her and let her know what was happening. ‘He would have found a phone and rung me. He had every intention of coming home.”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“People just didn’t seem interested. Now, with social media, if someone goes missing you hear about it straightaway. I just got to the stage where I was really disillusioned with everything. When they were talking about this new police operation … why couldn’t they have done something like this earlier? None of the men who were around then are probably still alive.”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“Families—strangers who knew one well when one was a child.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“The Negro family for three hundred years has been on the tracks of the racing locomotives of American history, dragged along mangled and crippled.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“I can’t imagine feeling that way about someone,” she said. “I mean, building a house for them, and then burning parts of it to the ground when they die, and burying them beneath black flowers—” She broke off, glancing at him. “Who does that?”

“My family,” he said.”
― Nenia Campbell, Raise the Blood

“Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;
they look calm, but calm is not the truth.
Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.
We must return to where it was lost
if we want to find it again.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Eigentlich ist jede Familie eine Sekte für sich, mit irgendeiner speziellen Idee oder Wahnvorstellung, um die alles kreist, oft naheliegende Dinge wie Status, Macht, Tradition, Prominenz, Vermögen, Schönheit, Talente der Kinder.”
― Miriam Böttger, Aus dem Haus

“Families are overenthusiastic tattoo artists. You make a tiny mistake just one time, and it’s like they immediately ink that thing onto you forever.”
― Remy Lai, Fly on the Wall

“Most houses don’t keep the same inhabitants for generations, especially not in towns. The life in them changes and ebbs and flows; the rooms change; they are not usually, for as long as this, one person’s room. Life does not stay in them as life has stayed in this.”
― Rumer Godden, Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time

“Yes, I am your mother, but for all that, you seem to me like a scourge. I ask myself what I have ever done to be dragged down into the depths by my daughter. And your father—what had he ever done? And you have presumed to use the word love in connection with this—with these lusts of your body; these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body—you have used that word.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“...familial love isn't guaranteed, and even when you have it, it doesn't always keep you safe.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“I have read stories of budget airlines stranding families and them having to pay $9,000 to get home!”
― Steven Magee

“May God provide food for all the families on earth.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Anders knew he would soon lose his father, and that impending loss seemed more concrete now, more real, not like air but like a door or a wall, something you could bang against, bang into, and of course children know they will lose their parents, they know it from early on, but most are able to believe that that particular present will not come, that it is years away....”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“Parenting is like a fruit salad.
We need a bit of every ingredient. Children go through all feelings: sweet, salty, sour and bitter, so as parents we have to know how to balance that palate.”
― Janna Cachola

“In our household we think that one parenting style is not gonna cut it. Parenting is like a fruit salad.
We need a bit of every ingredient.”
― Janna Cachola

“Parenting is participation.”
― Janna Cachola

“When a loved one is incarcerated, it's like an atom bomb falls on them, obliterating everything in an instant. Their freedom, their movement, their livelihood, gone. But the bomb's shock waves spread out and envelop close family and friends too. The prison industrial complex eats incarcerated people as the main course but also feasts on their relatives, relationships, and communities. Its appetite is voracious.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“I had always been a "good" kid, the kind of kid that parents didn't have to worry about. My homework was always done, I never talked back, I always followed the rules, and I happily went along with what everyone else wanted. In a normal nuclear family, that kind of stuff made parents proud, right? But in a family such as mine, it made me forgettable.”
― Lyn Painter

“And he said...

...dress not up your children in your own reflection.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“And he said...

...once you are bitten the relationship will be torn apart with hunger.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Wars are crazy and ill founded.
Man has forgotten that we are a guest on this home of ours.
He steals! He lies! He kills!
For what?
A twenty second call to fame to inflate his ego and pockets.
Why doesn't the rest of the world stand up for a change instead of coverting their own reflection?
We are a world of slaves who are too afraid to call their masters out.
Mums, dads, grandparents, children need to stand up and fight, not with guns but with determination to start the world in a new direction,”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“You may not believe it now, but the human race only went on because we loved one another. We were better than the animals because love came before sex to build families and defend them against the world.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Lifecycle of Suns

“So much of the story we tell about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throughout our lives we are told certain stories and they are stories that we choose to believe--stories that become embedded in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of.

For many of the people I met at Blandford, the story of the Confederacy is the story of their home, of their family--and the story of their family is the story of them. So when they are asked to reckon with the fact that their ancestors fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved, there is resistance to facts that have been documented by primary sources and contemporaneous evidence. They are forced to confront the lies they have upheld. They are forced to confront the flaws of their ancestors. As Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the New York Times in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston massacre, "You're asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters." Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world.

But as I think of Blandford, I'm left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we've been told. What would it take--what does it take--for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn't mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn't make that story true.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Just occasionally families could be one’s worst enemy. Especially loving families.”
― Mary Balogh, Always Remember: Ben's Story

“All these years they've told each other that there were no secrets and no lies between them, but love was harder than that, and sometimes edits and omissions were a form of kindness.”
― Addison Lane, Blackpines: The Antlers Witch: The Witch's Judgment

“I had expected an otherworldly goddess of ice but am instead bowing to a far more dangerous deity: a wife and mother who is disappointed in her husband and her son.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History