Multigenerational Quotes & Sayings

All humans at some time experience injustice, assault, disqualification, invasion and betrayal. No person is completely shielded. We need not trace our family trees very far back or study for long what life was like for our forbears to uncover humanity's abusiveness. The inherited scars of our multigenerational families exist in our family systems as we know them today. The abuse of the past often exists as the shame of today, and the shame is perpetuated through our patterns of interaction. — Merle A. Fossum

What I saw appalled me. I felt my hair rise like bristles on the back of my neck, and my heart seemed to stand still. — Bram Stoker

As different as Emily Dickinson's parents' life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande's in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they'd raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state - something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande's life to Alice Hobson's? — Atul Gawande

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? — Plato

1. Superrich individuals with multigenerational wealth and institutional investors (investors who are managing huge assets that represent, e.g., a corporation's or state government's retirement fund for its employees or an endowment at a university). 2. Reasonably well-off people 3. People who are getting by 4. Struggling individuals (the working poor) — Michael Edesess

Football is multigenerational. It used to be about fathers taking their sons. Now we're taking our daughters, too. — Steve Tisch

The worshiping community confesses and intercedes on the basis of, not the theory of God's existence, but the experience of a multigenerational community of witnesses. — Thomas C. Oden

Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born. — Jamais Cascio

I once led a church largely made up of young adults - twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, mostly. Many lamented that we weren't more multigenerational (you know, like the church), but at the same time the married young people wanted to be in a separate small group from the single young people because they didn't have anything in common with the singles. "You mean, besides Jesus?" I asked. — Jared C. Wilson

Now I can see: even the trees
are tired: they are bones bent forward


in a skin of wind, leaning in
osteoporosis, reaching


for a little more than any
oxygen can give: when living


is in season, they can live;
but living is no reason


to continue: everything begins:
and everything is desperate


to extend: and everything is
insufficient in the end:


and everything is ending:
Now I can see: even the trees — Malachi Black

If our primary caregivers are shame-based, they will act shameless and pass their toxic shame onto us. There is no way to teach self-value if one does not value oneself. Toxic shame is multigenerational. It is passed from one generation to the next. Shame-based people find other shame-based people and get married. As each member of a couple carries the shame from his or her own family system, their marriage will be grounded in their shame-core. The major outcome of this will be a lack of intimacy. It's difficult to let someone get close to you if you feel defective and flawed as a human being. Shame-based couples maintain nonintimacy through poor communication, nonproductive circular fighting, games, manipulation, vying for control, withdrawal, blaming and confluence. Confluence is the agreement never to disagree. Confluence creates pseudointimacy. — John Bradshaw

I was so naive when I began acting, professionally. — Alanna Ubach

All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance. — Deborah Moggach

SHAME-BASED FAMILIES AND MULTIGENERATIONAL ILLNESS One of the devastating aspects of toxic shame is that it is multigenerational. The secret and hidden aspects of toxic shame form the wellsprings of its multigenerational life. Since it is kept hidden, it cannot be worked out. Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets. — John Bradshaw

Amitav Ghosh's multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma. — Nancy Pearl

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience, a family bonding experience. — Al Yankovic

We're multigenerational Squires. (Carl)
Which means what? You prance around with tinfoil armor and plastic swords pretending to be knights? (Nick) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' Thst sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that.
Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time. — Meg Jay

There were some piled furs in the corner, but they were gross and old, and Zuzana was pretty sure that a variety of otherworldly vermin were living out rich, multigenerational sagas in them. — Laini Taylor

My stories deal with multicultural situations as well as multigenerational settings. — Patricia Polacco

Great numbers of Asian Americans do not fit the model minority or 'tiger family' stereotypes, living instead in multigenerational poverty far from the mainstream. — Eric Liu