Our Family Tree Quotes & Sayings

The day you appeared on our family tree, I wanted to cut it down. — Jamie McGuire

My family sat in their pool courtyard," Harah said, "in air bathed by the moisture that arose from the spray of a fountain. There was a tree of portyguls, round and deep in color, near at hand. There was a basket with mish mish and baklawa and mugs of liban - all manner of good things to eat. In our gardens and, in our flocks, there was peace ... peace in all the land."
"Life was full with happiness until the raiders came," Alia said.
"Blood ran cold at the scream of friends," Jessica said. And she felt the memories rushing through her out of all those other pasts she shared.
"La, la, la, the women cried," said Harah. — Frank Herbert

Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas. — Colin Camerer

As we gather around the rough-hewn farm table made by my grandfather, I am reminded that my family has come together for generations in this same way. Summers were always our favorite times; we would eat outdoors under the shade of a tree - hand-rolled pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden, cheese from my Aunt Carmella, olive oil sent by our cousin in Santa Margherita, and wine from our own jugs. After having our fill of food and laughter, we'd pluck ripe figs right off the trees, peel and eat them until the sun disappeared into the blue. I can still taste those summer days, and will always do everything in my power to re-create them. — Adriana Trigiani

Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? — Richard Dawkins

The family trees of all of us, of whatever origin or trait, must meet and merge into one genetic tree of all humanity by the time they have spread into our ancestries for about 50 generations. — Guy Murchie

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada--the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check. — Barbara Kingsolver

Our family is white as far back on the family tree as I've ever looked, and I guess I picture people white white white unless someone tells me otherwise — E. Lockhart

Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree. — Kamila Shamsie

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community. — Henry Louis Gates

After church on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my family would go chop down our Christmas tree. Once it was home and placed in its stand, Mom and I would painstakingly decorate our tree. It took hours to place the tinsel, string the lights, find the perfect spot for my favorite macaroni and felt ornaments from kindergarten. — Molly O'Keefe

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights. — Cory Booker

No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries
no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy
are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species. — Neil Shubin

I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other's destiny. — Mary Oliver

We're all born nameless, aren't we? And the name we end up with has only peripherally to do with our family tree. — Emma Bull

We do not demonstrate against anything. Our group is about being for something, never against. No antis except on my family tree. — Julia Glass

In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn't be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss.
By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance. — Gloria Steinem

There was a time, before the battles between men and dragons, when the Veiled Valley was green and covered with trees, berry bushes, and wildflowers. Birdsong filled the air from early morning until sunset. Sunriseside, a mountain poked its peak above a vast, dark forrest. At the base of its tree-covered slopes, far below our ancestors' cave, a lodge housed a large family of Valley folk. — Susan Bass Marcus

Pursuing a family history beyond a simple catalogue of names is always evidence of separation, of severing ties at least to the extent of holding one's relations at arm's length. The family member who want to make a private gift of a family tree to a close circle of relatives soon becomes the historian who estranges her antecedents by locating them "in history". I found that family history, which humanizes those who might otherwise be mere faces in a crowd, also defamiliarized those closest to me, giving their lives a larger pattern than they had when they were lived. They became both more and less themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that this is what history does to us too. As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us. — Alison Light

Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest
and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result? — Daniel Quinn

There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place for the special decorations. It seems like my parents gave up the magic when I figured out the Santa lie. Maybe I shouldn't have told them I knew where the presents really came from. It broke their hearts.
I bet they'd be divorced by now if I hadn't been born. I'm sure I was a huge disappointment. I'm not pretty or smart or athletic. I'm just like them- an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies. I can't believe we have to keep playacting till I graduate. It's a shame we just can't admit that we have failed at family living, sell the house, split up the money, and get on with our lives. Merry Christmas. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Tell me about your family, I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way. — Mitch Albom

None of that means my family's not spiritual. (Though what happened to Marvin has put me at odds with God these days.) To their credit, our parents have spent considerable time discussing the difference between Faith - the abiding belief in a Divine Creator that's as plain a part of a hundred-year-old oak tree, or a fiery red sunset, as the nose on your face - and Religion - which is the rigamarole that makes some folks figure they've got a leg up on everybody else. — Susan Carol McCarthy

Her brother has a disease, an illness with the shape and sound of a snake. It slithers through the branches of our family tree. It must have broken her heart, to know that I was next. — Nathan Filer

My cousin is gay, I always tell him that in our family tree, he's in the fruit section. — Rodney Dangerfield

I think we all do our own thing and we all have our own talents, but it's good to know that you have a family tree of success so if you need the help on your journey to success then you can look around and see it around you. — Tyga

...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy away from our Christmas Tree! — Charles Dickens

It seemed that our family had been on this land for thousands of years; that we had sprung from the earth, born of its flesh like a tree or a flower, deep-rooted, not by our feet, but by our hearts. — Thea Halo

The Hitler movement is a stampede. It is something beyond reason, like a pulse beating, like a rush of blood to the head, like the sap rising from the twisted roots of a family tree ... in many ways it is the most remarkable upheaval of our time, perhaps the most momentous. — Anne O'Hare McCormick

When we allow material things to be more important than spiritual things, we lost a lot of very important ways in life, many fear dying and are so concerned about what they do if someone stole all their position, did we not come into this world naked? can we take all our riches with us when we pass? is success what really makes a man or women hear? can we actually buy real love? the twisted ways of thinking come from greedy people, a person who work hard should be paid more than one who work less but that's not the case here, it is all backwards this is what a man has brought forth because of the attitude that being certainly religion or family tree entitles them to it what they really forget is what we are from the same family — Wisdom

My dad has done a bit of research on our family tree, and we can trace it quite far back. My dad believes he has traced us back to being a great-great-great-great-great-great cousin of Wellington. — Tom Bennett

We had our family tree done ... turns out I'm a quarter gay on my father's side. — Brian Posehn

I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents. — Danny Meyer

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

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