Family Life Quotes

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Temples are for the gods,” Thucydides said. “No city has the hubris to put her own citizens on a temple.” Phidias promised, “The Athenians will look like gods.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“The reality is that the lives of the smallest patients are in our hands, and their clinical condition can change in an instant. No matter how many times you are involved in situations such as this, the physical stress and anxiety as well as the emotional and psychological effects of being immersed in that environment are dramatic and lasting on the human body, mind, and central nervous system. These effects are severe, and I firmly believe that they are cumulative over your lifetime.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“One of the greatest realizations that I clumsily stumbled upon during this process, was that these people didn’t need someone like me to tell them what to do; they needed someone like me to show them what can be done, together.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“The hypocrisy was too much to bear, the institution was paying over a million dollars for Mr. Hyde to perform “values training” to “protect our culture,” while they simultaneously paid $2 million a year for Dr. Porter to destroy it. It was a laughable facade, but instead I wanted to cry.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“You understand that you are being manipulated by others and you become overwhelmed by hospital bureaucracy. It feels as though you have been violated by administrators who have robbed you of your passion for helping children. That passion that drove you to become a healthcare provider is replaced with mistrust, negativity, and hopeless skepticism.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“Mr Churchill caught the end of one of the long ribbons from her bonnet, which were flying madly in the strong breeze. He toyed with it for a long while, then looked up into her eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” Jane answered. Her heart started beating harder. That was a lie. Maybe her breath was catching in her throat because she was lying: she fell in love with him the moment she saw him, rescuing the poor store clerk. Or maybe it was because he was standing so close to her, just on the other end of her bonnet ribbon. She felt her cheeks growing warm, and tried to talk herself out of blushing. He was not standing any closer to her than when they danced together, or sat on the same bench at the pianoforte. Why should it fluster her that he was wrapping the end of her bonnet ribbon around his fingers like that?”
― Jeanette Watts, My Dearest Miss Fairfax

“Karṇa walks, his back is straight, he is lit up by his divine earings; yet his feet drag. He turns into an alley. His head droops and falls to his chest. He stops. Mist swirls around him, becomes motionless, parts. From between his ribs steps a young woman. Her eyes and face and tongue are brown like old blood and she is decked in old things and she wears upon her wrists two burnt black bracelets. She places the point of a knife under Karṇa’s chest plate and cuts, a gentle sawing motion, the blade moving beneath the skin, a slicing of the quick: nerves, blood vessels, sinews. I feel his pain; not a stab; it is insistent, enduring, but sharp nonetheless, as with any loss.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“I’m not sure how big ten centimeters is, but Emily’s passageway into life was definitely not large enough to suit me. In fact, everything had been pushing on me for hours. I felt like toothpaste emerging from a tube. Painfully and slowly, like an inch per hour.”
― Jack Getze, Making Hearts

“His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Whatever burden it was that she was carrying around, I wanted to carry it for her.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Lathis rattle against steel railings. Drenched half-naked men, some with torn shirts, jump up and down waving their fists. Some chant ‘Bande Mataram,’ others ‘Mazdur ki jai,’ whatever is their preference, the motherland or the brotherhood of workers. The hammer and sickle, red but limp, flaps like a half-dead fish against the trunk of a banyan tree. The sky cries monsoon tears; it has been crying all night.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“She grabbed the phone from the counter and dialed a number she convinced herself she had forgotten, a number for
a home from which she tried desperately to run. A silence ate at her through the earpiece.”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“It was here at the bottom of heaven, where the sun was whole and the clouds burned away to give hope back to the hopeless, where the snow fell full and comfortable, where the wind was silent, even if only for the moment, it was here, Peter found his bear and Claus found his boy, and the world held its breath—”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“What I am trying to say is that insofar as religion and many other beliefs are concerned, my mind no longer possesses the power to imprison me; any punishment which I perceive to be doled out by God, is moreover the result of my own doing.”
― Kate Rose, The Angel and the Apothecary

“One by one, slow, quiet, with little more than a whispered end, Sofia snuffed the remaining candles. For every prayer she had that was never answered, she extinguished another light, another’s prayer, determined to take it back, to take them all back.”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“But in one pot, close to the edge—where the petals had tumbled over—Sofia planted a rosebush, a white one, and waited for the blossoms and the thorns.”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families... and you have no idea... what games goes on!”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More!”
― Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

“Had he not been the keeper of the flame, of anguish, trapped under the brilliance of what she had been to him? He had been a man of permanence, how could he have swayed to emotion like this?”
― Noorilhuda, The Governess

“Hope is putting Faith" on the line "and expecting results!

(from Mission Possible - Spiritual Covering)”
― Deborah L. McCarragher, Mission Possible: Spiritual Covering

“We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Claus myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys.
"Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten", Dad said, "you'll still have your stars.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“The happiness of a family is such a complex matter. Like a table laid out with a tea service, it looks so ordinary until it's threatened. Then it becomes infinitely precious.”
― Lynda Williams, Holy war

“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: Roman

“No one has an orderly home all the time, and unless you hire
a maid to clean and tidy constantly, families with kids won’t
always have tidy homes. Sometimes kids have bad days, a
family emergency occurs, or your child needs you to play
with them. These are all great reasons to leave the house to
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Help! My Room Exploded
entropy and focus on your family”
― Annie Eklöv, Help! My Room Exploded: How to Simplify Your Home to Reduce ADHD Symptoms

“Next morning, we drank endless cups of coffee in the airport restaurant…Suddenly wide-eyed, she stared past me: “Good grief, some of the people they let in here”.”
― Michael W. Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“Will turned over the last words for a long time. Then he thought about the flashing message-light up in the kitchen.”
― Michael W. Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows: A novel

“What if the real Minu was out there in the world somewhere? And here I was, trapped in this awful life I wasn’t supposed to be living.”
― Minu Cash, The Painted Pink Dress: A Daughter’s Story of Family, Betrayal, and Her Search for the Truth