Quotes & Sayings About Family More Than Blood

In life loyalty is something that you earn and Doreen had more than earned my loyalty over the years. But marriage is a rogue state with its own rules, and one of them is pledging your loyalty to somebody before you can be fully sure that they deserve it, so you stand their ground. You mess with him? You mess with me. That's the new rule. A husband is instant family. He gets the loyalty of a blood tie without doing any of the work. — Kate Kerrigan

We read that Adam and Methuselah lived so many centuries; at that time, it was the custom to marry in the family - marry as closely as possible - so that the tie of blood might be as strong as it could be made. — Max Heindel

That night, when the creature sleeps, when he sleeps, the mother escapes into her daughters' room. She tells her daughter that the creature's afraid of her having too much love, too much heart. She takes a tube of lipstick and drags it across her finger like a knife, marking it across her daughter's cheeks, red, blood, war paint. — Elijah Noble El

Always remember when it comes to family arguments and disputes. Blood is thicker than anger. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

They look at me and say how come you're winning? You came back from the dead three years ago, and you're already killing it. I mean I came back from the dead. Thanks to my family and thanks to Kevin Zinger and my brother Evidence and Rocko, especially my blood family and the guys in Swollen Members. I wouldn't even be here today if it wasn't for those people. — Shane Bunting

To each of the mourners outside in the lane, I would be no more than a pale face glimpsed for a moment behind the glass. I wished I could smile at each of them, but I knew I must not, since a grinning mug would spoil their memories of this sad occasion.
We were all of us mourners overtaken by the moment: It was not ours to shape. We must give ourselves over to being the Grieving Family, upon whom others must be permitted to shower sympathy.
All of this I knew without ever having been told. It had somehow been born in my blood. — Alan Bradley

She did it without thinking--At that moment she was pure Gilly again: red-haired, with fury for blood, perfect aim, and nothing to lose. — Tiffany Baker

It was one of those things everyone had an opinion about - that it was what you had when you didn't have anything else, that family was always there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of those words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and think they could get away with it. Family wasn't any more reliable than marriages or friendships or blood-sworn crew, and maybe less. — Paolo Bacigalupi

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's. — Anna Quindlen

No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. — William Shakespeare

A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family's love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world. — Andre Maurois

I don't really know a whole lot about complicated, worldly things. But I think parents and siblings, they need to be able to care for each other unconditionally. How many people could you risk your life to protect? Not that many, I bet. Everyone's top priority is taking care of themselves. But if there's anyone who can overcome that, it's flesh and blood. If you understand that feeling, then you can look at other people, and realize, this person's family cares about them, too. That's a really heavy feeling. When you think about that, it becomes a lot harder to do horrible things to them. So I think that love for your family ... is really at the root of what it means to care for other people. — Mohiro Kitoh

The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime. — Edmund Burke

Tru, this is your home. You are my blood kin, my second cousin thrice removed. But blood kin's not the most important kin. Do you know what is?" "No, sir." "Love kin. And that comes from the heart. That's why this is your home. — G. Neri

We must love all human beings, giving even our last drop of blood for all our siblings of this great human family. — Samael Aun Weor

It's not about blood,"
says Lucius. "It's
about who you share
your life with.
Where you feel
you really belong. — Emma Cameron

Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins. — Charles Eastman

In every family there is a murderer, a thief and a crazy person. And if you have a little Blue blood in the line, you can be sure there are more than one of each. — Clark Jeffries

Tobias loved her more than he'd loved anything - his family, his duty, even himself. There, perhaps, the Herondale blood ran true. — Cassandra Clare

Under the Iranian code, the worth of a woman's life equals half of a man's, a point that often leads to grotesque legal judgments that effectively punish the victims. In this instance, the judge ruled that the 'blood money' for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions. — Shirin Ebadi

The American Heart Association reports: There are numerous benefits of daily physical activity: reduces the risk of heart disease by improving blood circulation throughout the body; keeps weight under control; improves blood cholesterol levels; prevents and reduces high blood pressure; prevents bone loss; boosts energy levels; helps manage stress; releases tension; improves the ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well; improves self-image; counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism; increases muscle strength; gives greater capacity for other physical activities; provides a way to share an activity with family and friends; establishes good heart-healthy habits in children and counters the conditions — Michael Todd Wilson

When I heard that heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined - when I heard that, I knew. The other thing that's very important is that heart disease ... is preventable. There are some specific lifestyle changes that women can make: losing weight, not smoking, exercising, eating healthy foods. Knowing the risk factors: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, [being] overweight. And if you have heart disease in your family, you should see your doctor. Because this disease is preventable. — Laura Bush

Blood is one thing, but that's not all that goes into family. The family you choose is the family that really matters. They're the ones who'll keep you standing. — Mira Grant

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children. — Extract From Chief Seattle.

Alex's experience of real family - of blood relations - was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it. — James S.A. Corey

They had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes' conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality. — Harper Lee

The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies. — Paolo Bacigalupi

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

You are blood. You are sisters. No man can break that bond. — Kim Boykin

Rocky is a poor Italian boy from a poor Italian family, and he appreciates the buck more than almost anybody. He's only got two halfway decent purses so far, and it was like a tiger tasting blood — Rocky Marciano

I took the wife's family out for tea biscuits. They weren't too happy about having to give blood though. — Les Dawson

Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect - they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long - but as long as there's no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. — Cris Beam

The family we're born into is important, sure, but they're not all we have. They're not all we are. A part of life is making your own family. That's the beauty of it all." I smile softly. "Do you have a big family?" "I do," he says, "but most of us aren't blood related. — J.M. Darhower

Anger harms no one more than he who harbors it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment. — Dean Koontz

So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were little more than nothing. — Jane Austen

Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound? — Philippa Gregory

The average clan - and there were more than fifty of them in 1745 - was no more a family than is a Mafia "family." The only important blood ties were those between the chieftain and his various caporegimes, the so-called tacksmen who collected his rents and bore the same name. Below them were a large, nondescript, and constantly changing population of tenants and peasants, who worked the land and owed the chieftain service in war and peacetime. Whether they considered themselves Campbells or MacPhersons or Mackinnons was a matter of indifference, and no clan genealogist or bard, the seanachaidh, ever wasted breath keeping track of them. What mattered was that they were on clan land, and called it home. — Arthur Herman

We understand that a family is something you make. I grew up hearing 'blood is thicker than water,' and maybe it's true, but in the gay community we've got more than water between us. We've got something stamped onto our DNA, something that marks us as belonging to each other every bit as much as we belong to our birth families. I'm not sure people outside the circle can ever fully understand a connection they've never experienced. — Rachel Spangler

Family is more than blood — Cassandra Clare

Aidan pulled away and stared intently at her. His blue eyes blazed with intensity. "Listen to me. You have every right to be scared, but I want you to believe me when I say that Noah is going to be fine. He's blessed with some strong as hell genes." Placing his hand on her belly, he smiled. "He's part Fitzgerald, and for generations, the men of my family have been known for being tough, scrappy fighters with a will of iron to survive."
"Really?" she questioned with a hiccup.
Aidan nodded. "But even more than the fighting Irish Fitzgerald blood pumping through him, he's inherited the most amazing DNA from his mother. She's the strongest person I've ever known. — Katie Ashley

Not by blood, or even by marriage, but family is more than that. You find people you love and keep them close to you. That's what a family is. — Jay Bell

Because the things you do for blood - for family - well, I think they cause most of us more problems than can be fairly called our share. And the things you do for the people you call family who aren't blood ... some of them are even worse. — Robert J. Crane

Family. It was just a word ... Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant ... It was a thing everyone had an opinion about - that it was all you had when you didn't have anything else, that family was there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of these words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and get away with it. Family wasn't more reliable than marriages or friendships ... maybe less ... The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. — Paolo Bacigalupi

But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood. — Martina Boone

I dream of a day when governments and societies no longer value blood and race over children, and the millions of unwanted children are freed at birth for adoption by people of every race. Aside from all its other benefits, massive adoption is the best assurance that people will never again slaughter the "other." When members of every family are one of those "others," such hatreds will become, finally, impossible. — Dennis Prager

But family doesn't have to be blood relations only. I think family is more a state of mind. — Elizabeth Eulberg

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles. — Holly Black

Oh, I know my family's not of royal blood, but you needn't throw it in my face all the time. — Robert N. Lee

Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus? — Juvenal

I didn't get here based on lineage, Travis. I'm here because I work hard. The only thing that's blue in my family lineage are the collars. The blood is just red. — Maisey Yates

they'd come. As his taillights disappeared through the pine forest, a horrible feeling that she was losing the rest of her make-shift family washed over her. Chapter Ten The hours of driving hadn't cooled Kong's blood. His rage hadn't lessened. He hadn't wised up or conjured second thoughts on the revenge he would take. Hours of driving had only given him purpose and allowed him to calculate exactly what it was he was doing by going after Rhett. His people had gone too far, and now Kong would make his stand. He'd rebelled in his youth when he was — T.S. Joyce

I haven't been here long, but, nevertheless, all the same, what I've managed to observe and verify here arouses the indignation of my Tartar blood. By God, I don't want such virtues! I managed to make a seven-mile tour here yesterday. Well, it's exactly the same as in those moralizing little German picture books: everywhere here each house has its Vater, terribly virtuous and extraordinarily honest. So honest it's even frightening to go near him. I can't stand honest people whom it's frightening to go near. Each such Vater has a family, and in the evening they all read edifying books aloud. Over their little house, elms and chestnuts rustle. A sunset, a stork on the roof, and all of it extraordinarily poetic and touching ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The family got nervous about blood poisoning and persuaded he and Call to saw it off. — Larry McMurtry

The foolish families worry over blood. I care nothing for purity of family or ancestry. That is a vain thing. I care only for strength. What a man can do to other men, women. — Pierce Brown

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

Blood doesn't make you family. Hell, an only child can bleed. It's the sharing of pain that makes you family. 'Cause, you can't really love a brother or sister until you know that they're as scarred and broken as you are. And, hey, if you grow up with a father like mine and you aren't at least a little scarred and broken, well then, that's not your father. You were spawned by an entirely different guy. — Christopher Titus

He licked his lips before he continued treating her neck. "Where I come from, family's defined as those who don't screw you over a paycheck. Blood makes no difference. If you can trust them with your life and know that they'll be there come whatever hell rains down, then they're your family." In her world, family meant they had the good grace to stab you while looking you in the eyes. She couldn't imagine her sisters standing by her side for any reason. Unwilling — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Because blood is blood, and every family has its own force.
Its own flavor.
Its own charm and strange. — Stephanie Kuehn

Blood is thicker than water,
The young man said
As he knifed his friend
For a drooling old bitch
And a house full of lies. — Ernest Hemingway,

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all. — Sonia Sotomayor

Family wasn't build by blood-it was built by love. — Brittainy C. Cherry

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Amazingly similar in the execution. A bow pulled, an arrow shot. Entirely different in the aftermath. I killed a boy whose name I don't even know. Somewhere his family is weeping for him. His friends call for my blood. Maybe he had a girlfriend who really believed he would come back ... — Suzanne Collins

A family is a messy unwieldy thing bounded only by blood andbeneath all the embarrassmentaffection. — Priya Parmar

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? — Alice Sebold

The family home is where the deepest resentments grow, subtle, relentless as moss, the furring of surfaces organic and gradual, as though life were no longer flesh and blood but bricks and mortar, a suffocation. — Charles Lambert

Family doesn't always have to come with blood. It only has to come with love. — Lisa N. Paul

Card five hundred and thirty-four," repeated Artemis. "Of a series of six hundred standard inkblot cards. I memorized them during our sessions. You don't even shuffle."
Argon checked the number on the back of the card: 534. Of course. "Knowing the number doesn't answer the question. What do you see?"
Artemis allowed his lip to wobble. "I see an ax dripping with blood. Also a scared child, and an elf clothed in the skin of a troll."
"Really?" Argon was interested now.
"No. Not really. I see a secure building, perhaps a family home, with four windows. A trustworthy pet, and a pathway leading from the door into the distance. I think, if you check your manual, you will find that these answers fall inside healthy parameters."
Argon did not need to check. The Mud Boy was right, as usual. — Eoin Colfer

No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it's own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that's why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot - being only human - put asunder what God has joined together. — Whitney Otto

I believe family first. Blood is thicker than water. I grew up like that, and I want to continue to keep that goal in my heart. Just family first! Just honesty, integrity, and respect. All of that. I live by the code of those things. If you do that you'll be fine. — Cory Hardrict

I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That's a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research. — Baratunde R. Thurston

Margaret ... you must know that you could never change your own life. You are a girl: girls have no choice. You could never even choose your own husband: you are of the royal family. A husband would always have been chosen for you. It is forbidden for one of royal blood to marry their own choice. You know this too. And finally, you are of the House of Lancaster. You cannot choose your allegiance. You have to serve your house, your family, and your husband. I have allowed you to dream, and I have allowed you to read, but the time has come to put aside silly stories and silly dreams and do your duty. — Philippa Gregory

My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we're blood. — Eminem

There's sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That's the way it's meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time. — Tad Williams

But not all Jews were victims- look at Chairman Rumkowski, who sat safe with his new wife in his cushy home making lists, with the blood of my family on his hands. And not all Germans were murderers. Look at Herr Fassbinder, who had saved so many children on the night that children were taken away. — Jodi Picoult

Family not only need to consist of merely those whom we share blood, but also for those whom we'd give blood. — Charles Dickens

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. — Susannah Sandlin

Ohana isn't just your blood, Tess. It's the family you choose for yourself. Family isn't just the people who made you; it's the people who love you. — Rebecca Addison

If your family - just because they're blood doesn't mean that they necessarily give you the best advice. — Alicia Keys

A lot of people in my family have high blood pressure. Dre told me I better start hitting the gym ... so I took his advice. — Warren G