Family Conflict Quotes

“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, defame it, stalk it, gossip about it, pray over it, put it down or dissect its motives it continues to rot in your brain. It is dead. It is over. It is gone. It is done. It is time to bury it because it is smelling up your life and no one wants to be near your rotted corpse of memories and decaying attitude. Be the funeral director of your life and bury that thing!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“More salt on the places that never healed.”
― Holly Green

“I do not and will not have my life dictated to me by someone else, even if the person doing it is you, my father!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Thusnelda & Armin the Younger Years Book 1

“I needed my mother, or I needed a mother, even though I was well past an age to justify that need. (224)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Ever since I was younger, it has always been tell your mom this! Tell your dad that! You two talk to me more to talk to each other than to actually talk to me! I am your daughter but you treat me like a staff member! Like you hired me to be the in-between in your relationship! IT IS EXHAUSTING!”
― Brigid Au, Tied Together

“My goal consisted of trying not to anger her—or anyone… (73)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I feel powerless to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be thrown out down here. (88)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I don’t think I realized back then that I wanted to rewrite the past, though, perform a do-over. It’s only in hindsight I’ve come to this conclusion.”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“For my part, I never knew who she’d be on any given day. Now that she’s gone, the mystery remains unsolved, part of my untranslatable life (161).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Once our reasons to be together—our parents, our childhood years—had been removed, not much linkage between us remained (181).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Unconditional love in my family was rare; you had to earn love, but it proved to be an elusive goal, the artist's vanishing point, unreachable in the distance. The more I tried to earn my parents' respect, the more it backfired, having the opposite effect (191).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translating. It’s exhausting (166).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I realize it has taken the death of both my parents for me to finally begin to see who I am, but not through their eyes. I’ll never forget them; my parents I have been in lockstep ever since I was young child, but their words drowned out my own voice. I’m starting to come into my own. (240)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I'd been given a foreign text to decipher, but I couldn't even identify the language, much less the meaning behind the words; she was speaking in some code (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Words had a purpose. Language had a purpose; I’d wrongly assumed that my mother wouldn’t misuse it (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Maybe moving away would make him not so disorganized. (He doubted himself.) He would send pictures to his mom of his new room, showing not only his tidiness, but also his self-sufficiency and that he could make ends meet by himself. Which would surprise her, maybe even offend her; yes, she would have been wrong about him—because Randolfo could take care of himself, he thought with a sense of pride.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, Dona

“He looked right into her eyes; didn’t she know the way she was? She had always treated him like that, his eyes argued. She did not agree—she had never treated him like this, he had spent his lifetime criticizing her. That was only true because she had spent her lifetime criticizing him—and that was how they always came back here, sometimes a wordless moment, their eyes glancing at each other like in a fencing match, each of them accusing the other of playing the role of the victim, portraying each other as the enemy to justify their self-inflicted wounds. She had turned into an uneducated woman (he would argue). He was evil (she would say), he was unable to recognize and acknowledge the good things people tried to do for him.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, Dona

“They would be at peace away from each other (he concluded), where they could miss each other, blinded by distance, causing the illusion that they had gotten along merrily when they lived together.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, Dona

“She still has him.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, Dona

“स्वार्थ ही यदि होगा आधार,
होंगे बहुविवाह व व्यभिचार,
कैकेयी का होगा उद्भव,
षड़यंत्र तब लेंगे आकार,
विमाता से ममता का, उतरेगा यदि आवरण,
राम को वनवास तथा, दशरथ का होगा मरण।”
― Pradyumna Kumar Tiwari, त्रिकूट: धर्म का चक्रव्यूह

“Legacy for my daughter matters more than competition, one-upping, or trying to make someone look bad. These pages exist for the long-term endurance of this narrative, so she can see another perspective and a bigger picture, whether I am here or gone.”
― Neal Winsomer, Calling Out the Shadows: A Father's Stand Against the Current: Clarity over comfort. Transparency over secrecy. Structure over spin. Love over anger.

“Balance rarely felt possible. We were going to look at it her way. In most instances, if an approach doesn't work with her perspective, it won't work for her.”
― Neal Winsomer, Calling Out the Shadows: Skimmer's Edition