"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."

Family, Guilt, Love, Distance

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"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."

Exlpore more Family quotes

"If I would be made come to earth again, I would ask for the same mother again. If made to return 100 times to earth, I would request to be born through the same mother 100 times!"

Israelmore Ayivor, Ghanaian Author

Family, Mother, Gratitude, Life, Identity

"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars."

E. M. Forster, English Novelist

Family, Mothers, Nations

"So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip."

Will Rogers, American Actor

Family, Gossip

"They play in the Meadow. The dancing girl with the dark hair and blue eyes. The boy with blond curls and gray eyes, struggling to keep up with her on his chubby toddler legs. It took five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it."

Suzanne Collins, American Novelist

Family, Fear, Joy, Motherhood, Love

"It's funny how two people can grow up in the same town, go to the same school, have the same friends, and end up so totally different. Family, or lack of it, counts for more than you'd think."

Sarah Dessen, American Author

Family, Identity, People, Life

"A good mother... when you CRY, she CARRIES you; when you are HUNGRY, she will HURRY to feed you; when you are about to SLEEP, she SINGS for you! Long live good mothers! Thank you mama!"

Israelmore Ayivor, Ghanaian Author

Family, Mother, Love, Care, Nurturing

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

Family, Quarrels, Rules, Skin

"Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents' foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood."

Mokokoma Mokhonoana, South African Philosopher

Family, Aging, Responsibility, Hope

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish Dramatist

Family, Dance, May

"Mother is the center of the family, everyone else surrounds her."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Family, Mother, Center, Surrounds

Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistakeme again."

Self

"There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with."

Privacy

"You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source."

Mind

"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."

Philosophy

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

Knowledge

"Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers-their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges-But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight."

Humanity

"This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash."

Life

"It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed-to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!"

Philosophy

"The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."

Family

"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."

Art