families Quotes

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

″ ‘Feeling hot, baby?’ the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam. Then, unkindly, ‘Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!’ and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family.”

“But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.”

“In war, when soldiers come, they take everything. You must bury anything to save it. You must hide your childrens, also.”

“She didn’t like America, but she didn’t hate it, either. Two and a half years and eight gazillion books later, she had Bird. Then we moved to Brooklyn.”

“We’re gifted, just like some families are smart, and others are rich, or beautiful, or athletic.”

This is why the Word of God exhorts husbands to love their wives, wives to love their husbands, parents to love their children and Christians to love one another.

“Úrsula suddenly realized that the house had become full of people, that her children were on the point of marrying and having children, and that they would be obliged to scatter for lack of space. Then she took out the money she had accumulated over long years of hard labor, made some arrangements with her customers, and undertook the enlargement of the house.”

“Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.”

“The two families rode in silence through the deserted streets to the field he warned, ‘Remember not a word from any of you.’ The guard recognized him as the chief test pilot for the new spaceship. ‘My family and some friends are coming down to watch me take off,’ he told the guard.”

“We all live in Busytown and we are all workers. We work hard so that there will be enough food and houses and clothing for our families.”

The hardships that these families face, the prejudices against them, and the overall hate that some individuals have for immigrants are all topics highlighted in the text.

“But the dresses must serve another purpose now. Would they bring enough to pay her passage on a ship? Fine cloth like this was rare in Connecticut. In many families, she had learned, one dress such as these would be handed down through three generations as a cherished possession.”

“Some of us come from families where we were not taught healthy emotional language and habits. We did not get a balanced perspective of the world and relationships, and some of us got a distorted view of where we stood in relation to the rest of the world. We felt (and many of us still do) less than. In order to make up for that, we learned to exaggerate and lie and blow our accomplishments way out of proportion in order to feel of some value. To succeed, we have to stop thinking we are less than other people. We tell ourselves we are not unworthy, inadequate, or unable to cope fully with life’s problems. We begin to see the glass as half full instead of half empty. We have to get rid of feelings of inability before we can make progress. As we learn more about how false pride has held us back from our full potential, we remember, “If we change our thoughts, we can change ourselves.”