Quotes & Sayings About Choosing Your Family

When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to "being crazy" and having had abusive parents, clients will choose "crazy" most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her therapy:
I hate it when we talk about my family as "dysfunctional" or "abusive." Think about what you are asking me to accept - that my parents didn't love me, care about me, or protect me. If I have to choose between "being abused" or "being sick and crazy," it's less painful to see myself as nuts than to imagine my parents as evil. — Lisa Ferentz

Choosing to break up your family is one of the most difficult decisions you will make in a lifetime. But once you have come to it; it will be with certainty. Certainty that you are ready to embrace the changes, the challenges and the joys of starting a new life. — Lisa Thomson

We get a lot of calls where the person is murdered at home, but is not found for a period of time. And so the animals have already started to take the body apart because they haven't been fed in that period. So your evidence is being chewed up by the family pet.
I tell you - Dogs are more loyal than cats. Cats will wait only a certain period of time and they'll start chewing on you. Dogs will wait a day or two before they just can't take the starving anymore. So, keep that in mind when choosing a pet.
You know how a cat just stares at you, maybe at the top of the TV, from across the room? That's because they're watching to see if you're gonna stop breathing. — Connie Fletcher

For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B — Tom Morello

If you want to look at the state of humans, you should look at the state of animals first. People are choosing whether or not they can feed an animal and their family. And every shelter coast-to-coast is stuffed. — Rachael Ray

Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice. — Betty Friedan

We need to be shaping our kids into arrows that will fly straight to the target God has set for them. If we're not carefully shaping and aiming our arrows, others will try to steal them and shape them for their use. What's worse, they will aim our children at targets of their own choosing. We should never be surprised if we are wounded by the members of our own family, if we have allowed sworn enemies of Christ to aim them. — Gregg Harris

Friends are the family we choose for ourselves — Edna Buchanan

Would you marry you? Be the right person before seeking the right person. Solomon's bride is carefully chosen for the good of his family, for the good of his kingdom.
pg 9 — Michael Ben Zehabe

You don't choose these people and in the not choosing you learn tolerance. You learn to forgive. — Heather Babcock

My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and they weren't very happy at the idea of me choosing acting as a career. Everyone in my family went to university - my older brother is a lawyer - but when they saw me for the first time at the theatre, they thought, 'OK.' They like it very much now. — Caterina Murino

One's nativity is not of his own choosing, but whatever it may be, it is entitled to respect; and all nations have honorable place in the world's family. — Paul Harris

The night after we talked, Jason couldn't sleep. He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence. "She's not a bad girl," my friend said. "She was just choosing the best story available to her." I pictured his daughter flipping through the channels of life, as it were, stopping on a story that seemed most compelling at the moment, a story that offered her something, anything, because people can't live without a story, without a role to play. "So how did you get her out of it? — Donald Miller

Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family. — Juliette Binoche

I stare into my own eyes for a moment. Today is the day of the aptitude test that will show me which of the five factions I belong in. And tomorrow, at the Choosing Ceremony, I will decide on a faction; I will decide the rest of my life; I will decide to stay with my family or abandon them. — Veronica Roth

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. — Jonathan Safran Foer

That was the beauty of Family, Dakota decided, you knew what it took to make them bleed. The magic was in choosing not too. — Ann Simko

I'm choosing to suffer less. To put myself and my family through less pain. — Brittany Maynard

The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing. — Harriet Lerner

This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore - even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the "confident girders" behind them in the past. — Christopher Ryan

It is true that you can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends.
It is also true that you can choose your partner and in doing so, you end up choosing the family you've always wanted. — J.R. Rim

Fiona had spent months choosing furniture, spent years buying and even paying off paintings that she'd found, deliberated greatly over the frames she'd buy to put her family's photos in.
The blinds ...
The crockery ...
The ... the ...
The nerve! — Kristen Ashley

Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don't even know we're making, they're so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation - like my mom choosing Wyatt's memory over Dad and me. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Genes, I have learned, do not make a family. Families are the people that stick around through good and bad times. Sadness is a part of life. Choosing to be happy and see the glass half full is a struggle we all must make. — Jaycee Dugard

If you don't make a conscious choice ... someone else will decide for you. It may be your boss, a family member, an advertiser, a collective social influence, or someone or something else, but it won't be something of your deliberate choosing. — Steve Pavlina

My family and I cook at home almost every day together. The kitchen is the central and most important room in the house; it's a great way for us to connect. We love going to the farmer's market on Sundays as a family and choosing the ingredients together. — Jose Andres

Whether you are buying a car or casting a ballot, choosing a job or planning a family, follow your moral compass. Don't let others define you. Don't let advertisers mold you; don't let zealots ensnare you; don't let conventional wisdom trap you ... you are part of a much larger whole. — Denis Hayes