Family Quotes - Page 9

Maybe I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps I don't know him as well as I'd like to imagine. What does a person so willing to utterly remake himself hold inside his heart? Can I trust such a man? What motivates him?

In an instant she knew, and she felt a bit of relief.

Love. Love was what drove him.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me..Phil 3:14

To have the opportunity to know your parents is to have the opportunity to truly know yourself.

It is the mess that readers love. The fact that sometimes the people who love us the most aren't people we're related to, but people who join our family later. The book acknowledges how difficult family relationship are, and this fuss just proves it.

It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.'
'Why are you saying that?'
'She might need permission to die, Cal.'
'I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.

Not only had my brother disappeared, but-and bear with me here-a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.

I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life - to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end.

It's okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.

I have given my word that only death will take me from you.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.

Nico didn’t like to be touched, but somehow this brief contact with his father felt reassuring – the same way the Chapel of Bones was reassuring. Like death, his father’s presence was cold and often callous, but it was real – brutally honest, inescapably dependable.

They looked to each other for support, for strength, and at times, motivation, to remember why and for whom they lived.

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.

There was a saying in our family that no one ever died; people just dried up, were hung on a hook, and conducted their affairs from there.

Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...

Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)

Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?