Quotes about Family

Pauline, what would you do if your own brother had a party and didn't invite you?' I said ifn I really wanted to go to that party, I reckoned I'd go anyhow. Never mind what he want. She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was. Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can't like folks just 'cause they has the same mama.

The Morgans always seemed to be having a second conversation—an unheard dialogue right next to the one they spoke aloud.

Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat's curve.

Hi, dumplin'. Where your socks?" Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

Somehow, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything.

They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep. They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence—and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to nestle like plums under the limbs of their men.

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

There may be a hundred reasons that a husband is not fulfilling his role as the head of the home. But a wife who rebels against her head is only introducing a new element of spiritual sickness and dysfunction into the family.

Each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband