Only Boy In The Family Quotes & Sayings

Hey, pal, Matthew whispered. He was the only person who could get away with calling Ronan pal. Matthew Lynch was a bear of a boy, square and solid and earnest. His head was covered with soft, golden curls completely unlike any of his other family members. And in his case, the perfect Lynch teeth were framed by an easy, dimpled smile. He had two brands of smile: the one that was preceded by a shy dip of his chin, a dimple, and then BAM, smile. And the one that teased for a moment before BAM, an infectious laugh. Females of all ages called him adorable. Males of all ages called him buddy. Matthew failed at many more things than either of his older brothers, but unlike Declan or Ronan, he always tried his hardest.
Ronan had dreamt one thousand nightmares about something happening to him. — Maggie Stiefvater

If I were on death row, my last meal would be from Steak 'n Shake. If I were to take President Obama and his family to dinner and the choice was up to me, it would be Steak 'n Shake. If the pope was to ask where he could get a good plate of spaghetti in America, I would reply, "Your Holiness, have you tried the Chili Mac or the Chili 3-Ways?" A downstate Illinois boy loves the Steak 'n Shake as a Puerto Rican loves rice and beans, an Egyptian loves falafel, a Brit loves bangers and mash, a Finn loves reindeer jerky, and a Canadian loves doughnuts. This doesn't involve taste. It involves a deep-seated conviction that a food is right, has always been right, and always will be. — Roger Ebert

Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of Jim's favorite accomplishments. The odds were against you, in all matters of family planning. You couldn't choose to have a boy or a girl; you couldn't choose to have a child who favored you over the other parent. You could only accept what came along naturally... — Emma Straub

I never thought I'd ever leave Zerc. But after knowing Cricket, it occurred to me that I had no reason to stay. I had no family, no friends aside from her. I never even spoke to Enkai until she brought us together. It was she who first inspired me to dream of actually seeing those worlds I spent my every waking moment reading about. Her and her wild heart, her laughing spirit, so bright in her eyes whenever she spoke of her travels and all the wondrous places she had seen. When I was a boy, I envied her for her adventures. When I became a man, I only pitied her. — Ash Gray

The man has a curious inborn conviction of his own superiority which is quite unshakeable. All his life he has bullied and browbeaten those around him by his high-and-mightiness and his atrocious temper. As a boy he terrorized his entire family by his tantrums, when, if thwarted, he would throw himself on the floor and yell till he went blue in the face. It has been much the same ever since. Everyone's terrified of his rages. He has only to start grinding his teeth, and people fall flat before him. — Anna Kavan

I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
"I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
- Joy Williams from The Country — Joy Williams

Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his mother did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much. — Frank Pittman

I only steal because my dear old family needs the money to live!"
Locke Lamora made this proclamation with his wine glass held high; he and the other Gentleman Bastards were seated at the old witchwood table ... The others began to jeer.
"Liar!" they chorused
"I only steal because this wicked world won't let me work an honest trade!" Calo cried, hoisting his own glass.
"LIAR!"
"I only steal," said Jean, "because I've temporarily fallen in with bad company."
"LIAR!"
At last the ritual came to Bug; the boy raised his glass a bit shakily and yelled, "I only steal because it's heaps of fucking fun!"
"BASTARD! — Scott Lynch

This morning he told everyone that he's a "big boy" and he's giving up his pacifier for good. Then he threw his favorite binkie in the trash. Clap clap Clap clap Well, that New Year's resolution didn't even last a full minute. suck suck suck The only person in my family who didn't come up with a resolution is my older brother, Rodrick, and that's a pity because his list should be about a mile and a half long. — Jeff Kinney

All the men in the family went to the school, his Hampstead grandmother said (his only grandmother, Sylvie's mother having died long ago), as if it were a law, written down in ancient times. Teddy supposed his own son would have to go there too, although this boy existed in a future that Teddy couldn't even begin to imagine. He didn't need to, of course, for in that future he had no sons, only a daughter, Viola, something which would be a sadness for him although he never spoke of it, certainly not to Viola, who would have been volubly affronted. — Kate Atkinson

TESLA'S CAT
[Nikola Tesla's favorite childhood companion] was the family's black cat, Macak. Macak followed young Nikola everywhere, and they spent many happy hours rolling on the grass.

It was Macak the cat who introduced Tesla to electricity on a dry winter evening. "As I stroked Macak's back," he recalled, "I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak's back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house." Curious, he asked his father what caused the sparks. Puzzled at first, [his father] finally answered, "Well, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm." His father's answer, equating the sparks with lightning, fascinated the young boy. As Tesla continued to stroke Macak, he began to wonder, "Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God," he concluded. — W. Bernard Carlson

This girl. In love with the boy she can't have. Grieving the death of her father, only to find out she's about to grieve the death of the only adult left in her life? This girl who's being told she can't keep the only family member she has left? — Colleen Hoover

Get in my way again, boy, and you're going to learn that Velkan isn't the only one in this family who has fangs. Retta to Viktor — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Diogenes the Cynic was an ascetic by choice. He rejected his family's bourgeois status, got himself exiled from his native city, and went about in a threadbare cloak with only the barest possessions, a bag for his crust of bread and a cup for scooping water from fountains. When one day he saw a boy drinking from his hands, he smashed the cup, disgusted by his own love of luxury. — James Romm

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

If the boy did have a good and loving mother somewhere, surely they would find her.

God only knew how she wanted to believe it. Every single day, she practiced her detachment skills, trying not to care about everything that was wrong with the world. Or rather...to care, but in a suitably civilized manner, with an admirable commitment that might still be set aside when she came home to Morten and her family, complete with well-reasoned and coherent opinions of the humanist persuasion. Right now she felt more like one of those manic women from the animal protection societies, with wild hair and ever wilder eyes. Desperate. — Lene Kaaberbol

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values
or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be
to be through her son, to live through her son. — Andrea Dworkin

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it. — Adolf Hitler

Later, at four in the morning, Myron encounters his eldest son, Sean, in the kitchen. They talk about schoolwork (Sean has an imminent exam), about what Sean would like to become (a physicist and a poet). "Medio tutissimus ibis," Sean's father says, and the son translates, "You will be safest in the middle." (All three boys know their Ovid.) Son and father regard each other, and Myron says, or perhaps merely thinks, the following: "My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I. . . . I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child's hand so gently against Leo's infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed. — Edith Pearlman

When it's all said and done, the only thing that matter in life are so damn simple. Family, friends. being safe and well. I think before the war a lot of people got sucked in by the crap on TV. They thought having the right shoes or the right jeans or the right car really mattered. Boy were we ever dumb. — John Marsden

I'm pretty well. So's the family, and so's the boys, except for a sort of rash as is a running through the school, and rather puts 'em off their feed. But it's a ill wind as blows no good to nobody; that's what I always say when them lads has a wisitation. A wisitation, sir, is the lot of mortality. Mortality itself, sir, is a wisitation. The world is chock full of wisitations; and if a boy repines at a wisitation and makes you uncomfortable with his noise, he must have his head punched. That's going according to the Scripter, that is. — Charles Dickens

Personally, if I had two children, and one was a boy and the other a girl, and if I could afford to educate only one, I would have no hesitation in giving the higher education to the girl. The male could bend his energies to manual effort for reward, but the girl's function was the maintenance of home life and the bringing up of the children. Her influence in the family circle was enormous and the future of the generation depended upon her ability to lead the young along the right paths and instruct them in the rudiments of culture and civilisation.

- Sultan Muhammad Shah, The Aga Khan III — Aga Khan

Lucy wondered what it was she had found. A boy who wanted to be a writer. And a family who had picnics under the stars. She felt as if she had lost something. After all, that family now lived only in the pages of an old diary. — Kristin Kladstrup

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence. — William Gaddis

Here was what I wanted to happen when I walked through the door after my first real date and my first ever kiss. I wanted my mom to say, "Dear God, Meg, you're glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That's so adorable." Instead, I came off the high of that day by writing a letter to my dead brother and doing yoga between my twin beds, trying to forget my absent mother. — Laura Anderson Kurk

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch
only his own. — Sydney J. Harris