Quotes about Family

much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn't suit the moment. I let go of the river's song and found the music of that big house. I found room for a new life, a new mother who cared for me, and a new father who patiently taught me not only how to play music, but how to trust. He was as good a man as ever I've known.

I realize that those who have loved us are never really gone. They live on in all the ones we love and all the ways we love. They are the reason we know how to love at all.

Sisters are created not by blood but by love.

One of the best things a father can do for his daughter is let her know that she has met his expectations. My father did that for me, and no amount of effort on my part can fully repay the debt. I'd do anything for him, and for my mother. Now

I cannot put words to the feelings within me on the day we brought her out for burial. It is an odd thing to stand so close to life's beginning and life's end. Birth and death are such strange cousins. We carried my mother to the graveyard, shed tears and sang hymns, then returned home, stood over the cradle, smiled, and sang lullabies. . . .

Sometimes you need that soft place to fall. That's your family, your faith. The stuff that doesn't change when everything else does.

Nothing takes you from thirty years old to thirteen faster than your mother's voice rebounding up the stairs like a tennis ball after a forehand slice.

We are His children, each knit together as we should be. We must go by the name our Father has given us. Beloved.

One thing that discovering my own history had taught me is that we must learn not to whip ourselves for the failures of others. When a mother cannot love and protect her children, it is not the children who are defective.

Maybe these are woodpile relatives? People my grandmother doesn't want to acknowledge as part of the family tree? Every clan must have a few of those.

Families aren't dictated by geography, or biology, or the chemistry of chromosomes and DNA. There is, in fact, no perfect science to it at all.

When addiction runs in your family, you can't take chances. You can't try it once to see what it's like. One time can be the beginning of something you can't stop.