Quotes About Family

"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.

I'm in a very close-knit, very, very tight family. My grandmother had 13 kids, so we had a lot of family like 50, 60 grandchildren and we all lived in Jersey, relatively in the same area. So every time there was something, my entire family was there. And I just believed everybody's family was like that.

I have a pretty close family and there are certain similarities - maybe a lot of families have this - where geographically, we're separated, so there are times when one family member will be needing a lot at one particular moment, so everyone rallies around that particular family member. Then there are other moments where, if [the family is] okay, I might not talk to my brother for two or three weeks, but then if I get him on the phone at five in the afternoon, it feels like we spoke that morning.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.

We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about "the American family." The right wing has this thing - Focus on the Family. What the hell is that? I don't want to just discuss the issues - I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don't like to write things that feel like issue books.

Most of our life is miscommunication, and when you add a language barrier to it, it just becomes total mayhem and confusion... It just adds to it with all of the cultural differences. It could be an American family meeting another American family and you could still have a total clash. With family, it's like visiting another planet.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.

Learning to be extremely disciplined has been the key for me. I work really hard during work hours and family really hard during family hours. Family does always come first though, in any situation.

The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception...This (use of contraceptives) turns the attention to self and so it destroys the gift of love in him or her. In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows easily . . . And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.

How hard a thing is life to the lowly and yet how human and real is it? And all this life and love and strife and failure, - is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? The answer lies in each of us. For somewhere in your past ... somewhere some 100 years ago?there rose from the smoldering ashes of slavery?a proud and humble family who suffered and struggled with life. A family who found the strength to endure all the indignities of life in America, and that family had the hope for a taste of her bounties in the future.

In a family, you take on each other's problems and joys differently, and more intensely. The amplitude - and the undulation of the family - is different from the people you just generally bump into on the street, because you're chained together. And what happens if you break that chain? In almost every family that I know, someone has escaped, set themselves free, tried to run away - whatever what you want to call it. And often, they are made more conspicuous by their absence.

Both my mothers family and my fathers family go back almost a hundred years in the district. I was born in the district, raised in the district, raised my family in the district. And so thats the way I see myself.

So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself.

Our family is a circle of strength and love...Our family with ever birth and every union the circle grows, our family is a circle of strength every crisis faced together makes the circle stronger.

And having a strong family, you know we've lost some members of our family and had some setbacks, but I think a good family and kids all those things I thought at one time... you got to be kidding me... Those things are so important they enable you to go on.

Family can replace everything. So, before starting a family, one should think what's more important: family or everything.

You don't have to give birth to someone to have a family. We're all family - an extended family.

I grew up in a very loving middle class family. My parents were educators. I'm not even the first PhD in my family. They tried to shield me, just as other parents in my neighborhood tried to shield their children. But you knew there was a reason that you couldn't go to that theme park or to a movie theater or to a hamburger stand. They couldn't shield you completely. What they did though was they never let it be an excuse for not achieving, and they always said racism is somebody else's problem, not yours. They tried in that way not to make us bitter about Birmingham.

I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.

Family businesses that have been around for generations are suddenly closing their doors, and while I'm not comparing my situation or my family's situations to theirs, the fact that my father's business, which has been around for 30 years, might not be around, it gives me a perspective that makes me want to fight even harder for a lot of people.

I had lost my sister recently, too, which meant that my whole family was gone. I was the baby of the family. There were five Sendaks and there were five Wild Things, and now there's only one Sendak, and he's about to bite the dust, too! Life, as I said before, was very difficult at that time and so it was natural that there would be a change in the look of things. Also, I was very impressed with my own strength in doing this under the circumstances in which I was living.

Hey No one makes me do anything. Not my family. Not your family...not even you.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

It's not that diabetes, heart disease, and obesity runs in your family...It's that no one runs in you family!

I've lived through deaths in my family and I've lived through separations in my family so those are the big ones. Those are the ones that press the biggest buttons in human beings' lives.

Equal pay isn't just a women's issue; when women get equal pay, their family incomes rise and the whole family benefits.

Education in our family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre ... In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at high school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.

I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.

I started producing in 1992 at the age of 15, when I found out music could be made with the help of a computer. I come from a musical family, but was always the family member not as good as the others. So once I found out I could release the music that was stuck inside my head through a computer, I knew I found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

The best thing we can do for family values is to repeal the income tax. Then families will have the resources they need to implement their own values - and not those of the politicians. With the income tax gone, families will no longer be forced to have two breadwinners by necessity. Children will be raised better, family values will predominate, and crime will diminish. If your local school indoctrinates your child with values that are alien to you, you'll have the money to buy a private education.

I had older brothers and sisters who were high achievers, and I felt different, misunderstood by my family. That's not my family's fault; it was my perception.

I was appalled at how children had become the focus and gravitational center of the nuclear family around which parents orbited instead of the traditional arrangement in which children orbited around their parents. This is a huge change because a critical job in early childhood is to get children weaned away from the total narcissism normal to infancy. With the children as the center of the family's actions and decisions, narcissism is at a minimum prolonged and may never significantly decline.

To get married and have a family, is to grow up and mature. It's the only way. You can read philosophy books for a hundred years, but if you don't get married and have a family you will never get it. They soften you and shape you, mature you. Absolutely.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

I have family members who live in Africa. Because of the family that lives there, I know what is happening in these countries, and it seems so silly to me that diseases like malaria are so prevalent when they are entirely preventable. Yet children are still dying every 35 seconds.

Some people insist they've never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out.

Like anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my family and my overall life experience. Many who know me say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop doing great and useful things. So family, curiosity and hunger for knowledge all define me.

I also call my family and see what's going on with them before I start my day with interviews, rehearsals, or anything else. I just want to do everything well and still be there for my husband and children. I am so grateful for my family because they are so understanding. I can't take all of the credit; it's a team effort.

I cook and I really believe in the family dinner, I think that's a nice time to bring the family together.

I love being from a screwed up family. We have everything in my family: prescription drug abuse, mental illness, one of my uncles is a Mormon.

We have always understood that the foundations of the family, as an eternal unit, were laid even before this earth was created! Society without basic family life is without foundation and will disintegrate into nothingness.

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are.

I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing. I missed her first words. I missed her first steps. I'd leave work before she woke up and got home after she was asleep and didn't really know her. So it was important for that reason to reintroduce myself to the family after all of that hard work.

I grew up in a big family. You have to learn to get along with each other... get things done as a family.

The family, as the fundamental and essential educating community, is the privileged means for transmitting the religious and cultural values which help the person to acquire his or her own identity. Founded on love and open to the gift of life, the family contains in itself the very future of society; its most special task is to contribute effectively to a future of peace.

The pictures of my family were designed to be on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother's wall in her house.

Children thrive in a variety of family forms; they develop normally with single parents, with unmarried parents, with multiple caretakers in a communal setting, and with traditional two-parent families. What children require is loving and attentive adults, not a particular family type.

It's sad to have to leave your family but I like the idea of someone believing in something so strongly that are willing to find a new family.