Family is the heart of our lives, providing love, support, and unforgettable moments. Whether you're looking for words to celebrate the bond you share or seeking inspiration during challenging times, these 143 inspiring family quotes capture the essence of connection, strength, and unconditional love. Dive in and let these heartfelt words remind you of the beautiful ties that hold families together.
1. “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” - George Burns
2. “Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.” - Kay Redfield Jamison
3. “No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.” - Erma Bombeck
4. “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
5. “You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble.” - Mario Puzo
6. “Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.” - Joyce Carol Oates
7. “Before you were conceived, I wanted you. Before you were born, I loved you. Before you were an hour, I would die for you. This is the miracle of love.” - Maureen Hawkins
8. “God is the designer of the family.” - Gordon B. Hinckley
9. “You don't love Buck. If you did, you'd have four kids by now. Wouldn't you? Now wouldn't you? A woman like you...” - Erskine Caldwell
10. “When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family. ” - Jim Butcher
11. “You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.” - Elizabeth Berg
12. “We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.” - Tori Spelling
13. “Ironically, girls who don't think so much about their family and are a little bit self-centred are not only happier themselves but also maintain good relationships with their families.” - Farahad Zama
14. “One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God.” - Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
15. “Son, there are times a man has to do things he doesn't like to, in order to protect his family.” - Ralph Moody
16. “No, I`m putting it away, trying to buy a house for my family. The goal is to use the money to move into a big house, so my daughter can have a garden.” - Ewan McGregor
17. “We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.” - J.D. Salinger
18. “It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.” - Gabrielle Zevin
19. “Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” - Diane Setterfield
20. “It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.” - Orson Scott Card
21. “People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but it's the way you live your life that matters. And the people you know. Valentine was Hodge's friend, and I don't think Hodge really had anyone else in his life to challenge him or make him be a better person. If I'd had that life, I don't know how I would have turned out. But I didn't. I have my family. And I have you.” - Cassandra Clare
22. “Unless today is well lived, tomorrow is not important.” - Alan Sakowitz
23. “Raised on a cotton farm in rural Georgia, as many white/negro families did to make a meager living, my daddy had a saying.'All a poor man has is his good name and good credit. God help him if he looses either of those.'I still believe that.” - Susan Ethridge
24. “I am a Smedry, and we do ridiculous, unexpected, eccentric things like this all the time! Ha-ha!” - Brandon Sanderson
25. “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. ” - J.D. Salinger
26. “I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.” - Sherman Alexie
27. “i love playing and chatting with children...feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my...life. i like relaxing at the house, reading quietly, taking in the sweet smell that comes from the pots, sitting around a table with the family and taking out my wife and children. when you can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures something valuable is taken away from your life and you feel it in your daily work.” - Nelson Mandela
28. “Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?” - zadie smith
29. “to us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.” - Barbara Bush
30. “Imagine that the world had created a new 'dream product' to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.” - Frank Oski
31. “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.” - David Bowles
32. “I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk)” - Joan Bauer
33. “That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians.” - Ernest Hemingway
34. “These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.” - Rebecca Wells
35. “She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them” - Alexander McCall Smith
36. “Sometimes I want to be human for you.” - Sarah Rees Brennan
37. “I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.” - Christopher Hitchens
38. “How did your mother die?” asked Delk.“Car accident,” Katie replied, gazing out over the water. “She’d been to mass. A tire blew on the way home, and she was gone. I was nineteen, Pather’s age, when it happened. My brother was only eleven.” She paused. “I do know what you’re going through.” Katie looked at her.“Pather told you?” Katie nodded. Delk was glad Pather had told his sister; she was relieved not to have to tell the story again. “Does it ever . . . you know . . . get any better?”Katie shrugged her narrow shoulders and smiled. “In some ways it does, but it’s a bit like running a long race with a rock in your shoe. You get used to it, but it always hurts a little.” - Suzanne Supplee
39. “I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.” - Francisco X. Alarcón
40. “Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?” - Rick Riordan
41. “I thought about the earth then, really thought about it, the tsunami's and earthquakes and volcanoes, all the horrors I haven't witnessed but have changed my life, the lives of everyone I know, all the people I'll never know. I thought about life without the sun, the moon, stars, without flowers and warm days in May. I thought about a year ago and all the good things I'd taken for granted and all the unbearable things that had replaced those simple blessings. And even though I hated the thought of crying in from of Syl, tears streamed down my face.” - Susan Beth Pfeffer
42. “The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that.” - Rachel Cohn
43. “Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.” - Barbara Kingsolver
44. “Our pets are our family.” - Ana Monnar
45. “She smiled, pulling the photo a little closer, and I wondered if I should ask her, too, the question for my project, get her definition. But as she ran a finger slowly across the faces, identifying each one, it occurred to me that maybe this was her answer. All those names, strung together like beads on a chain. Coming together, splitting apart, but still and always, a family. (page 289) ~Ruby” - Sarah Dessen
46. “Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")” - A.E. Coppard
47. “Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.” - Voltaire
48. “Mother is a verb. It's something you do. Not just who you are.” - Cheryl Lacey Donovan
49. “We want to climb in with you,' Dermot said. 'We'll all sleep better.'That seemed incredibly weird and creepy to me - or maybe I only thought it should have. I was simply too tired to argue. I climbed in the bed. Claude got in on one side of me, Dermot on the other. Just when I was thinking, I would never be able to sleep, that this situation was too odd and too wrong, I felt a kind of blissful relaxation roll through my body, a kind of unfamiliar comfort. I was with family. I was with blood.And I slept.” - Charlaine Harris
50. “Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mum told him to shut up. But she was smiling when she said it. Lucy liked that.” - Kerrie O'Connor
51. “The love of money is the root of all evil, therefore selfishness must be the seed.” - M.D. Birmingham
52. “That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.” - Deb Caletti
53. “I need them and they need me to need them” - Rosie Thomas
54. “I wish I worried about my uncle's opinions, and had problems to work out with my mom. Hell, I'd settle for knowing what her voice sounded like." I put a hand on her shoulder. "Trite but true—you don't know what you have until it's gone. People change. The world changes. And sooner or later you lose people you care about. If you don't mind some advice from someone who doesn't know much about families, I can tell you this: Don't take yours for granted. It might feel like all of them will always be there. But they won't.” - Jim Butcher
55. “I told myself that some families we get without asking, while others we choose. And I chose those two. I think that’s what you’d call a silver lining.” - Jenny Valentine
56. “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.” - Aravind Adiga
57. “The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.” - Mother Teresa
58. “I liked having some time to myself. Our family was such a close one, you could get smothered. Of course, we didn't always agree with one another. Sometimes I quarreled with my brother and sisters, but I couldn't remember hating anyone for more than five minutes.” - Gloria Whelan
59. “Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.” - Shannon Alder
60. “There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.” - Mitch Albom
61. “Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.” - Alex Haley
62. “Give more, so that we can build more, put interest in understanding another more in whatever actions one might carry out in life. Because we all are fighting for survival against adversaries and are sometimes falling, but if we stand together and help shield and strengthen one another, imagine the world that we will live in together, having more happiness with one another, at one another’s side.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett
63. “Relatives share the same bloodline, but FAMILY shares your successes, pains, ambitions, celebrations, failures, values, love and so much more. I realize that many friends have become Family and some relatives just are not. (Analogy: Blood scatters everywhere, when Family runs together...When I thought I needed "Blood" to survive, I realized that what I really needed was "Family"!)” - Gaye Miller 2012
64. “...Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you've ever been there, you know the signs don't tell you the exit you're coming up to, they only point out the exits you've just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods--and since you're probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with.” - Neal Shusterman
65. “When dancing with a pit bull, it's always best to let him lead.” - Michael Barnett
66. “The Internet doesn’t love you or need you – but your family does.” - James Chartrand
67. “(I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. maybe more important than my family.) Can your best friend be more importamt than your family?” - Sherman Alexie
68. “Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.” - Joseph Heller
69. “Hagrid, look what I’ve got for relatives!” Harry said furiously. “Look at the Dursleys!”“An excellent point,” said Professor Dumbledore. “My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms on a goat. It was all over the papers, but did Aberforth hide? No, he did not! He held his head high and went about his business as usual! Of course, I’m not entirely sure he can read, so that may not have been bravery. . . .” - J.K. Rowling
70. “I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.” - Harriet Brown
71. “She wants you to be a god," I told him."I know." His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.” - Madeline Miller
72. “"All that history, the love & laughter, is designed for youth. It is what keeps the story of who we are alive from one generation to the next. It ensures our indelible mark in the souls of generations we will never have the pleasure of holding in a warm embrace. Life is short people. Before you know it, another decade will pass, people you love will be lost to this world, and all that will be left of them is what we carry in our hearts." Elsie Love 2011” - Elsie Love
73. “Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.” - Jodi Picoult
74. “You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair." Douglas MacArthur” - Terri Marie
75. “You can't force folks to have good sense, even if they're family. Maybe especially then.” - Patricia C. Wrede
76. “Flea stared at us, "I can't decide what's worse. Losing family members or not having a family member to lose.” - Maria V. Snyder
77. “He doesn’t have to love your CD collection. He doesn’t have to love your shoes. But any good, mature guy better make an attempt to love your friends and family—especially when they’re great.” - Greg Behrendt
78. “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.” - Kristine Grayson
79. “When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.” - John Sedgwick
80. “After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly. Grandpa wanted to do his part too.” - Kara Martinelli
81. “Never judge someone by their relatives.” - Charles Martin
82. “Daring to make a difference in today's youth-one page at a time” - William Sawyers
83. “[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.” - Jeannette Walls
84. “Do you know how marriage was defined in ancient Greece? Noel said in a calmer tone. Its really simple. A virgin goes to mans house with the family gathered as witnesses. The virgin and the man share a fire, a meal, and a bed. If the girl wasn't a virgin in the morning, then the couple was considered married. That's it” - Josephine Angelini
85. “You need to make time for your family no matter what happens in your life” - Matthew Quick
86. “Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.” - Sir Winston S. Churchill
87. “To have the opportunity to know your parents is to have the opportunity to truly know yourself.” - Amy Denise
88. “What do you think it would have been like if Valentine had brought you up along with me? Would you have loved me?"Clary was very glad she had put her cup down, because if she hadn't, she would have dropped it.Sebastian was looking at her not with any shyness or the sort of natural awkwardness that might be attendant on such a bizarre question, but as if she were a curious, foreign life-form."Well," she said. "You're my brother. I would have loved you. I would have...had to.” - Cassandra Clare
89. “We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.” - Marilynne Robinson
90. “Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.” - Andrea Lavinthal
91. “It seems to me, that you people spend a great deal of time talking about honour, but strip away the high sounding words and you are no different from any other race. Family? Has Priam not killed wayward sons? When a king dies do his sons not go to war with one another to succeed him? Men speak of how you reacted to your father's death. They say it was amazing, for you did not order your little brother's execution. Your race thrives on blood and death, Helikaon. Your ships raid the coasts of other nations, stealing slaves, burning and plundering. Warriors brag of how many men they have killed, and women they have raped. Almost all of your kings either seized their thrones with swords and murder, or are children of men who seized power with swords and murder. So put all this talk of honour to one side.” - David Gemmell
92. “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.” - Bernard Branson
93. “The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.” - Louis Zamperini
94. “Death, I've dreamed of it, I've desired it, but what real happiness can come from it?” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett
95. “Van was feeding Christian as we walked in the door. I shielded my hands in front of my face to prevent from seeing her bare breast. "God damn woman, put that tit away!""I'm feeding my daughter. You want another taste?"I started gagging immediately just thinking about how bad that shit tasted. "Hell no! I would rather eat dog shit.” - Jennifer Foor
96. “Toys have taken over my family room. I watch Mary Poppins, and no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar I eat, action figures won’t march into a bin with the snap of my fingers.” - Barbara Brooke
97. “All the kids with fancy shoes or clothes, do you know what I got with a family of nine? When ever we said let's play poker, we had a full team of adults right there.” - Julia Marriott
98. “Even if a man has everything - money, power, the key to eternal life - he still is nothing if he is without a family to love him and for him to love.” - Latrivia S. Nelson
99. “Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a point where this mania for normalizing turns toxic.” - Ben Fountain
100. “Interesting how fashion is cyclical,” Jaccob said when she came out of the store with two black plastic bags. “Goth was the look when I was young, too.” “It’s not a look,” Chuck said. “I’m just wearing my feelings on the outside.” “Uh huh.” His phone buzzed. “Hang on a second." He rolled up his sleeve to check his HUD, but the call hadn’t come through there. Huh. He had to pick up his phone and check the read-out, which listed a phone number: an old school page. “That’s funny…” “Dad, you’re doing that thing again,” Chuck said. “What thing?” Jaccob asked. “That thing where you have to check every single doohickey you carry around.” “I am not.” Jaccob took his hand out of his coat pocket, where he’d been reaching to check his police scanner or music player (he hadn’t decided which to use first).” - Erik Scott de Bie
101. “Love's the sonstood stammering elocutionwhile the poor ship in flames went down” - Elizabeth Bishop
102. “We all fight for money, some for power, but most of all for love. But me, I fight to become a champion.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett
103. “The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked” - Meg Rosoff
104. “I could never leave,' Pine Sap said. 'Why?' she asked.Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. 'Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.” - Jodi Lynn Anderson
105. “It doesn't matter what story we're telling, we're telling the story of family.” - Erica Lorraine Scheidt
106. “I have more concern for my nephew's welfare than for Lannister pride.” - George R.R. Martin
107. “When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.” - E.B. White
108. “Her family was a relay team racing toward Tomorrowland, but her father died, and in their shock they kept losing the baton.” - Stacy Bierlein
109. “Mom always said too much chocolate is like having too much love—you can't get enough-Geraldine Solon, Chocolicious” - Geraldine Solon
110. “When we want to see someone in a certain way, we find a way, but when we don't we have to wake up and see who they truly are and not what our pain or anger chooses to believe.” - Shannon L. Alder
111. “This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.” - Richard Peck
112. “Your heart’s strength is measured by how hard it holds on. Your self worth and faith is measured by finally letting go. However, your peace is measured by how long you don’t look back.” - Shannon L. Alder
113. “It's very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you're not perfect.” - E.L. James
114. “Why keep in touch with them? That's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.' 'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly.'Nonsense, Mother... Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats... and there's Great-Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a penknife...They're all bats.” - Gerald Durrell
115. “Jesus is busy with his own stuff, and is not going to get involved in your little tug-of-war. Plus, don't forget, he has his own mother to deal with. She's all he can handle, as far as mothers go.” - Anne Lamott
116. “You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore… All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone… Or maybe it's like this rite of passage… You will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It’s like a cycle or something. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.” - Zach Braff
117. “We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter of blindness,--"blind as a bat," for instance. It would be safe to say that there cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families. Tempers strain and recover, hearts break and heal, strength falters, fails, and comes near to giving way altogether, every day, without being noted by the closest lookers-on.” - Helen Hunt Jackson
118. “They shared a laugh, and then the silence that so often intruded on their discussion asserted itself once again, a gap born of equal parts weariness, familiarity and--conversely--the many differences that fate had created between those who had once gone about lives that were but variations on a single melody.” - Christopher Paolini
119. “You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you...” - George R.R. Martin
120. “I never let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him.” - Alice Sebold
121. “Your family should be there. Your family should always be there. What does it say about you if they aren't?” - Chris Lynch
122. “Now the snow's coming down, and im watching it fall. Watching the people around, baby please come home. Pretty lights on a tree, and im watching you shine. You should be here with me! Baby please come home” - Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench
123. “A young girl needs to spread her wings, but a young woman needs roots.” - Sydney Logan
124. “I live precariously through my characters - so I want them to be loved passionately, live vibrantly, love unconditionally. Make friends they would die for - Explore unimaginable possibilities from all warps of life. And to never forget those that held their hands when life got scary. Wiped their tears away after a broken heart. Helped them back on their feet when others let them down. I want my characters to have family and friends - just like mine :)” - Patti Roberts
125. “She loves him the way a mother should love their child. Thoroughly. Completely. To her, he's the most important person in the world and I'm so very happy they have that.” - Nyrae Dawn
126. “She told me to wait,that I was going to lose a finger." Earl looked toward the kitchen and back at Ty and Duece. He snorted. "I asked her, did she think I was stupid? Then a couple of snips later, whack. Off went the finger. And you know what that woman said to me? I said 'Mara you cut my finger off.' And your mother said to me, 'Well Earl who's stupid now?” - Abigail Roux
127. “I saw a movie once that said that two people in a family aren't enough.” - Rebecca Salas
128. “Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.” - Arthur Hailey
129. “I don't really know them, but I know this: they're just like your kids were. Or are. Sweet, trusting, good in ways we adults hardly even remember. We have to look out for them. Not because of the tattoos, or in spite of them, but because they're kids and we're supposed to look out for kids.” - Sabrina Vourvoulias
130. “Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten.” - John Cheever
131. “They say blood is thicker than water, but I say ice, can be more solid than blood, when times get cold.” - Anthony Liccione
132. “It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?” - Russell Brand
133. “Life is a continuous feeling wherein something you work for it to be happy in terms of your soul.” - Fernando Lachica
134. “There is nothing better for your family than for you to be at your best, for you to be at your own peace, for you to be showing them in every way who you are, and what you stand for.” - Steve Maraboli
135. “Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?)” - Philip Yancey
136. “Family, like arsenic, works best in small doses...unless you prefer to die.” - David Levithan
137. “But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not. We can ask for someone who will say, “You are noble enough,” and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt.” - Lemony Snicket
138. “If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them.” - Shannon L. Alder
139. “The purpose of family is to preserve life,' Aunt Patti said. 'We treat family members the way we're supposed to treat everyone on the planet.” - Liz Rosenberg
140. “Well, you ought to stick with it, even after you mess up-but sticking with it is a lot easier if you have a family who believes in you.” - Kathryn Littlewood
141. “Let us live not only to serve God ourselves; let us live to help our children and their children live for God.” - Dillon Burroughs
142. “The passive and overt violence waged against the women and children of the world must end.” - Bryant McGill
143. “The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.” - Shannon L. Alder
