Poetry About Family Quotes & Sayings

Without any way out, not even toward the depth. — Franz Kafka

Love was something I would not have to worry about - the whole mystery of love, heartbreak songs, and family legends. Women who pined, men who went mad, people who forgot who they were and shamed themselves with need, wanting only to be loved by the one they loved. Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity. Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. Sex was a country I been dragged into as an unwilling girl - sex, and the madness of the body. For all that it could terrify and confuse me, sex was something I had assimilated. Sex was a game or a weapon or an addiction. Sex was familiar. But love - love was another country. — Dorothy Allison

I still give my friends relationship advice, of course, and I'm not bad at it. 'Anyone's crisis but mine' is my motto. — Carrie Fisher

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction? — Virginia Woolf

But I can't control my dreams. I can't even remember them. For all I know I'm having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can't remember. So I'm forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I'm either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one.

But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I've got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that. — F.K. Preston

I would beg the wise and learned fathers (of the church) to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration ... [I]t is not in the power of professors of the demonstrative sciences to alter their opinions at will, so as to be now of one way of thinking and now of another ... [D]emonstrated conclusions about things in nature of the heavens, do not admit of being altered with the same ease as opinions to what is permissible or not, under a contract, mortgage, or bill of exchange. — Galileo Galilei

Friday night's alright for fighting
Saturday, Sunday, Monday too
Every night is a night of fighting
With family and friends like you — Jessica-Lynn Barbour

I was thrilled and grateful to be safely away from that maniac. Do you have any idea what it's like to wake up and realize that no one is going to rape you that day? How wonderful it is to see the sunlight pouring through your window? How great it is to just walk around without a heavy chain on your wrist or ankle? It feels amazing. And once you have that feeling, you want your full independence. In other words, you want your whole life back. — Michelle Knight

One probably hears about it.
One, wire, recognizes.
One holds her bones up next to each other.
One insists, grinding the clutch.
One would powder and powder.
One would ask out of the back of the throat.
One refuses.
One is so sad.
One is helpful all of a sudden.
One turns.
One shimmers; hiccups.
One puts on a tie and keeps finding a place for his hands.
One breathes the old purple.
One nods because no one speaks loud enough anymore.
One doesn't approve, but trusts.
One is so sure. — Jennifer Clarvoe

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark. — H.L. Mencken

Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself.

I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

I had no idea.
I thought that love was loss.
Why is the measure of love loss? — Jeanette Winterson

Where youthful beauty is unconscious, mature beauty is knowing and sophisticated. — Sophia Loren

I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects. — Sarah Kay

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry. — Jonathan Evison

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I'll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait might
fold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy's: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me - a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami. — Nicholaus Patnaude

It is a gift we humans have, to hold on to beauty felt in a moment for a lifetime. — Nina Sankovitch

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower. — Jack Kemp

America - where we hate our
fathers, love our mothers, and
everyone is hung up on trying
to be a man — Phil Volatile