Quotes & Sayings About Cousins

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent - deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind. — Sunil S. Amrith

The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all. — Norman Cousins

This love of money is the curse of American, and for the sake of it men will sell honor and honesty, till we don't know whom to trust, and it is only a genius like Agassiz who dares to say, 'I cannot waste my time in getting rich,' said Mrs. Jessie sadly. — Louisa May Alcott

Having Aelin help him the first time had been awkward enough that he couldn't even go until she started singing a bawdy tune at the top of her lungs and turned on the sink faucet, all the while helping him stand over the toilet. — Sarah J. Maas

We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves. — Gillian Flynn

Fortunately, I had cousins who lived in Buffalo and would often go to visit them, which I loved to do because I liked Buffalo as it was a big city. Even today, the bigger the city, the better. — Paul Smith

In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too gross for us. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Skating is now retro and hip. — Robin Cousins

The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical. — Norman Cousins

My mother's sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins. — Alan King

History is a vast early warning system. — Norman Cousins

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. — Colin Powell

I used to spend my holidays there in my grandparents' large family house, with my numerous cousins. When I die, I am going to be buried in the village cemetery. — Yves Chauvin

Now isn't that nice!' said the old lady. 'If cousins are the right kind, they're best of all: kinder than sisters and brothers, and closer than friends. — Elizabeth Enright

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth. — Norman Cousins

Cookie's cousin Lucille, for example. Or her second cousins. Or her uncle on her mother's side. Her whole family, in fact, was a Harvard study waiting to happen. — Darynda Jones

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn't have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book Children at Play, the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children's play occurred not with toys but with other children - siblings, cousins, and peers. — Jennifer Senior

The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible. — Norman Cousins

At school, there were more Davids than any other name: more than 20 of us cousins out of 40 pupils. When my older cousins moved on, the school had to close. — Saul David

We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy in America. — Norman Cousins

Seeing people catch a feeling in their spirit and sprint the aisles of the church while my cousins played driving, uplifting gospel stuck with me. I let that same feeling wash over me when I experience and perform music. — Lizzo

A secret is like a bag you have to lug around all the time - each day you add another lie, and it just gets heavier and harder to carry on your own. — Dave Cousins

I think what you're seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they've got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out. — Barack Obama

I also suggested that my five cousins establish ground rules in respect of their personal lives, particularly in respect of their marriage to Draupadi. Each brother would have access to Draupadi's bed chamber for one year at a time. This was to prevent disharmony among the five. All the brothers were also allowed to marry other women so that they would have companionship for the four years when Draupadi was inaccessible to them. — Ashwin Sanghi

Mma Ramotswe found it difficult to imagine what it would be like to have no people. There were, she knew, those who had no others in this life, who had no uncles, or aunts, or distant cousins of any degree; people who were just themselves. Many white people were like that, for some unfathomable reason; they did not seem to want to have people and were happy to be just themselves. How lonely they must be
like spacemen deep in space, floating in darkness, but without even that silver, unfurling cord that linked the astronauts to their little metal womb of oxygen and warmth. For a moment, she indulged the metaphor, and imagined the tiny white van in space, slowly spinning against a background of stars and she, Mma Ramotswe, of the No. 1 Ladies' Space Agency, floating weightless, head over heels, tied to the tiny white van with a thin washing line. — Alexander McCall Smith

All my cousins steal things. They're just a bunch of thieves. My whole family is like that. You put something down for a second, and they steal it. You never see it again. — Gaby Hoffmann

The Goldschmidts had joined forces with other Rothschild cousins, the Bischoffsheims, to form a banking partnership which financed the North in the American Civil War. — David Icke

Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence. — Norman Cousins

You know, all my songs are relatives, brothers, sisters, cousins. — David Coverdale

Mithros's spear, Kel!" he exclaimed. "When did you turn into a real girl?"
"You said she was a girl already," muttered one of his cousins ...
"But not a girl-girl, with a chest and all!" protested Owen.
... "I've been a girl for a while, Owen," Kel informed him.
"I never realized," her too outspoken friend replied. "It's not like you've got melons or anything, they're just noticeable. — Tamora Pierce

What did you do?' I whisper to Aithinne. Aithinne pushes to her feet, dusting off her clothes.'I redirected its blast away from us so it used its weapon on itself. ' She scans the destruction.'Easy.' 'Ah, yes,' I murmur, trying to quell the emotions that rush through me at seeing my childhood home destroyed. 'Simple's sibling, Easy. I don't even want to imagine the levels of chaos that would prompt visits from their cousins Straightforward and Uncomplicated. — Elizabeth May

Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel. — Leon Uris

Cousins are part of your life so stick with cuz not friends. — Claude Shannon

For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. — Christopher Hitchens

I have already given two cousins to the war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother. — Charles Farrar Browne

Are you all right?" he asked Olivia. His heart was still racing with terror that she'd been hurt. "I heard a woman scream."
"Ah, that would have been me," Sebastian said.
Harry looked down on his cousin, face frozen in disbelief. "You made that noise?"
"It hurt," Sebastian bit off.
Harry fought not to laugh. "You scream like a leettle girl. — Julia Quinn

There is nothing wicked about having a dreadful singing voice, any more than there is something wicked about having dreadful posture, dreadful cousins, or a dreadful pair of pants. Many noble and pleasant people have any number of these things, and there are even one or two kind individuals who have them all. But if you have something dreadful, and you force it upon someone else, then you have done something quite wicked indeed. — Lemony Snicket

In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends. — Padma Lakshmi

A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn? — Hugh Mackay

A feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in
and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time. — Mark Twain

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man. — Norman Cousins

It's infuriating that yesterday, my father had to pull all my younger cousins into a room and tell them to be more careful. He had to explain that in some cases, their brown skin convicts them before an offense is even committed. — Janelle Gray

She wondered what he really saw when he looked at her. God, she hoped she didn't look like his mother or anything. That would be veering into a Hitchcock shower scene that she really didn't want to be the star of. — Jane Cousins

Laughter is inner jogging. — Norman Cousins

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions — Norman Cousins

One might - if one were, say, a gay sex writer - make a case that there's still a vibrant role for queer dirty words. While highly commodified mass-market DVD porn and its kinkier "specialty" cousins shows how sex looks, erotic texts are still the best mode to convey how sex - and its pesky cousin, desire - feels, and what it all means. — Simon Sheppard

I have a ton of cousins on my mom's side of the family, and we would put on shows together all the time and put on costumes, and we even charged our parents money. — Maulik Pancholy

Right when 'High School Musical' was taking off, one of my little cousins called and was really excited to tell me there was a huge 'I Hate Zac Efron' club at her school. I'm sure they're doing great. More power to them. — Zac Efron

As well as Assail and his two cousins, Fang I and II. — J.R. Ward

My mother has a very big family in Shanghai, so I have, like, almost 40 cousins, so we stayed together all the time. So by the time I get to Hong Kong, I become the only child and the only one surrounded by adults, you know. — Wong Kar-Wai

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species - the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us. — Elizabeth Kolbert

A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

I've loved singing since forever. Whether it was with my sisters while cleaning the kitchen, putting shows on for my stuffed animals, writing songs about my stuffed animals, starting an a capella group with my cousins while on vacation, or awkwardly singing along to karaoke tracks alone in my bedroom - singing always found a way into my life. — Kina Grannis

Your behavior inside your home is the real indicator of your character. Not in the workplace, not in school. Sure, it's nice to look good when you leave your home, and make a bella figure. But in terms of your identity, the most important thing is who you are with your parents, with your children, with your cousins. Th most important thing is how you behave with he people who really matter. — Katherine Wilson

It's funny in the U.K., where I'm not really known because I never did a soap. My English cousins in the Lake District think I'm not a real actor because they've never seen me in 'Home and Away' or 'Neighbours.' — Jacki Weaver

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats
"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"
and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity. — Ursula Vernon

Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa ... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles. — Stephen Jay Gould

I am a queen" she observes. "It is natural that men are going to gather round me, hoping for a smile. — Philippa Gregory

Belief becomes biology. — Norman Cousins

Sometimes family doesn't always consist of your relatives or by blood. Sometimes your best friends can feel more like family than your cousins. I think everybody kind of has that same feeling. When you go through an accident together, when you go through a traumatic event, sometimes that brings you closer together. — Michael B. Jordan

One of the ironic things," Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, " ... is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems ... . The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another."8 — Robert F. Kennedy

The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him. — Norman Cousins

Nick loved his cousins, they were family after all, and according to his mother, you have to love family. Over the years, he had also noticed that the less he saw them, the more lovable they became. He would really love them if they moved to California. — Shannon Ryan

They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins. — Ransom Riggs

Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins - teenagers like him - laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father — Jeremy Scahill

My first conscious thought of 'I should be like that and not like this' was probably at about six, and I was playing with ... I have a twin brother, and we were playing with our twin cousins, who are a boy and a girl. — Candis Cayne

I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her. — Susanna Clarke

While my cousins were gang-banging, I was trying to learn what the Internet was about. — Theophilus London

Ever since mankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. — Ben Aaronovitch

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home. — Norman Cousins

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself. — Norman Cousins

My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around - whatever. — Action Bronson

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind. — Norman Cousins

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. — Terence McKenna

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me. — Anne Lamott

My cousins gay, he went to London only to find out that Big Ben was a clock. — Rodney Dangerfield

The challenges that I face today are the same challenges we all face. Trying to balance your life between work, family, loved ones, your husband, your wife - boyfriend or girlfriend. If you have kids - balancing that, balancing your work with the time you spend with your kids. The idea of wanting to be a good parent and then the motivation to be a great parent. Whether you're black, white, any color. Rich, poor, regardless of religion, cousins of culture, we go through those. We have the same challenges. — Dwayne Johnson

She shut the door and moved on to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets. "There is nothing here. Nothing. What do you eat?"
"Ah ... " Assail found himself looking at the cousins for aid.
"usually we take our meals in town."
The scoffing sound certainly appeared like the old-lady equivalent of Fuck that. "I need the staples. — J.R. Ward

At dusk in the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, Melissa Overton barely heard the constant sound of crickets chirping all around them. Prowling through the dense, tropical rainforest as a jaguar, she listened for the human voices that would clue her in that her prey was nearby.
Waves crashed onto the sandy beaches in the distance as she made her way quietly, like a phantom predator, through the tangle of vines and broad, leafy foliage, searching for any sign of the poachers. Humans wouldn't have a clue as to what she and her kind were when they saw her - apparently nothing other than an ordinary jaguar. And she and her fellow jaguar shifters planned to keep it that way.
Her partner on this mission, JAG agent Huntley Anderson, was nearby, just as wary and observant. The JAG Special Forces Branch, also known as the Golden Claws, was only open to jaguar shifters and served to protect both their shifter kind and their jaguar cousins.... — Terry Spear

The kiss and the bite are such close cousins that in the heat of love they are too readily confounded — Heinrich Von Kleist

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? — Norman Cousins

Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher ... As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more ... Why has religion become a force just when we'd have thought it would be losing ground to secularism? — Phil Donahue

The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice ... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession. — Norman Cousins

Tohr shrugged. "Assuming he's kept the same ones on, they're a total of five. Three cousins. That porn star Zypher - "
Rhage harrumphed at that. Clearly, even though he was now very happily mated, he felt like the race had one, and only one, sex legend - and it was him. — J.R. Ward

Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie. — Jason Reitman

If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and the resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the hosts of orbs around him. He learns that, though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space. — Percival Lowell

A lot of people would rather tour sewers than visit their cousins. — Jane Howard

To be able to rise from the earth; to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets; to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible; to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe — Norman Cousins

The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners of this planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble. — Norman Cousins

We know how we will die - with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us. I — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.
I know this is troubling.
I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns.
Chimps. There's no excuse for them. — Katherine Applegate

Skating everywhere is unpredictable, no amount of money or facilities is going to create a skating star. You have to have a skater who is dedicated, passionate, and willing to learn. — Robin Cousins

Procrastination and fear are close cousins. — S.B. Sebrick

She thought about her cousins in Oklahoma, which was odd, since she'd never spent much time with them. She didn't even know them very well. Now she was sorry about that. — Rick Riordan

I have 52 first cousins. My mom and dad were the only two to move to North America, so I've got deep family there, but I'm a California kid. — Donal Logue

I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don't. You've so many females, wife, sister, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you've probably confused me with them all. — Renata Adler

Cousins are people that are ready made friends, you have laughs with them and remember good times from a young age, you have fights with them but you always know you love each other, they are a better thing than brothers and sisters and friends cause there all pieced together as one. — Courteney Cox

I was not the equal of my cousins in athletic ability or good looks, but I'd like to think God evened the score by granting me a modicum of common sense, which sometimes seems to be sadly missing in most descendants of Walter Kaminski, who have shown a tendency to live for the moment and think with their peckers. — Robin Yocum

She has a point," Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink. — Ann Patchett