Family Quotes (page 35)
May I ask you something?" I say. "Why do you read books, when you could be outside, living a million different adventures every day?" "Because you can always count on a book to stay the same. EVerything else changes when you least expect it," she replies, bitter. "Families split apart, and nothing's forever. In books, you always know what's coming next. There are no surprises.
Jodi Picoult
Well Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist— and I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave', as you call yourself! But how are you? I see I have frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.
Leo Tolstoy
The path that leads through Latin and alebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest much more: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing
J. M. Coetzee
[Marianne Moore] once remarked, after a visit to her brother and his family, that the state of being married and having children had one enormous advantage: "One never has to worry about whether one is doing the right thing or not. There isn't time. One is always having to go to the market or drive the children somewhere. There isn't time to wonder 'Is this right or isn't it?
Elizabeth Bishop
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts if family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the led; if there was a draft she sat in it-- in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others... I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted...
Virginia Woolf
Going public was a difficult decision, and I had misgivings. My subjective experience was now an objective fact in the wider world. It didn't belong to just me anymore - though I quickly learned that it hadn't belonged to just me in the first place. More than a million Americans and their families were going through the same thing; some openly, some in secret due to concerns of being misunderstood and marginalized.
Michael J. Fox
When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies...
Wilkie Collins
I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable...
Madeleine L'Engle
I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.'
You're the television? Or someone in the television?'
The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.
You're a God?'...
Neil Gaiman