Family Resemblance Quotes & Sayings

Who's that new guy with the snooty accent who came out and talked to the police?" Evan persisted. "He looks like some kind of male model."
"That's just my cousin Ian," Amy explained.
"Not much of a family resemblance," Evan noted sourly.
"He's like a twenty-fifth cousin, ten times removed."
Evan was not satisfied. — Gordon Korman

Micah showed up shortly thereafter and was happy to meet our other "brother."
He shook Adrian's hand and smiled. "Now I see some family resemblance. I was starting to wonder if Jill was adopted, but you two kind of look like each other."
"So does our mailman back in North Dakota," said Adrian.
"South," I corrected. Fortunately, Micah didn't seem to think there was anything weird about the slip.
"Right," said Adrian. He studied Micah thoughtfully. "There's something familiar about you. Have we met?"
Micah shook his head. "I've never been to South Dakota."
I was pretty sure I heard Adrian murmur, "That makes two of us. — Richelle Mead

The nature of poems
Is a matter of words and deeds
An intimate encounter of voice
In the ache of the heart
In the labor of breathing
A hesitant casting of eyes
Away from the mundane to see
That delicate and shiny thing
In the oddly prosaic rock pile
An extravagance of conceit
An abundance of grace
A prayer for words to speak — Kendall Dana Lockerman

Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him. — Andrew Pettegree

Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life's worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides. — William Styron

While he bore no real resemblance to anyone in my family, his features were a collection of my mother's and father's best attributes, with a few of Gregory Peck's thrown in. — Lisa Lutz

Are you sure that we're related?" Lydia asked. "I see no resemblance at all. — Sarah Price

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules
it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A family is a little world within doors; the miniature resemblance of the great worls without — Henry James

They only think they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs. But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that! — John Gardner

Do others see something of Christ in your life? Do they see a "family resemblance" to Him by the way you live? — Billy Graham

My work may feature brown faces but it could be anybody's story. — Tracey Moffatt

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a women, the institution of family and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of force. — H.G.Wells

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. — Lewis Thomas

If you're now noticing a certain family resemblance among this no-successive-instant problem, Zeno's Paradoxes, and some of the Real Line crunchers described in Paragraph 2c and -e, be advised that this is not a coincidence. They are all facets of the great continuity conundrum for mathematics, which is that (Infinity)-related entities can apparently be neither handled nor eliminated. Nowhere is this more evident than with 1/(Infinity)s. They're riddled with paradox and can't be defined, but if you banish them from math you end up having to posit an infinite density to any interval, in which the idea of succession makes no sense and no ordering of points in the interval can ever be complete, since between any two points there will be not just some other points but a whole infinity of them.
Overall point: However good calculus is at quantifying motion and change, it can do nothing to solve the real paradoxes of continuity. Not without a coherent theory of (Infinity), anyway. — David Foster Wallace

I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors. — Sarah Vowell

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead. — P.D. James

Now I see some family resemblance. I was starting to wonder if Jill was adopted, but you two kind of look like each other."
"So does our mailman back in North Dakota," said Adrian. — Richelle Mead

I seek no mercy; my conscience is clear. — Alojzije Stepinac

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance. — Lewis Thomas

They went around the room telling stories about how they'd gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or fallowed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before. — Lev Grossman

When you're born again, your DNA changes. You have the ability to understand God's terms. — Bill McCartney

Having sex is easy," he ocntinued. "All you need to do is undress the woman. But it's what comes afterwards that's such a drag; such a load of nonsense! — Anton Chekhov