#children

[Ava] had always thought the main relationship in the family was the one between Nancy and her daughters. To have a family, you needed a father, of course, and Jimmy had played that role perfectly well, if you were okay with an old-fashioned interpretation of the job. But the Nickerson family was all about the women and their noisy, bickering, gossiping, interfering relationships with one another. And now it seemed that maybe she ahd been looking at it all wrong. Maybe she and Lauren were just the icing, and the basic, underlying cake of the family was the couple in front of her who had a shared history she knew very little about. ↗

— Claire LaZebnik

#family #women-s-fiction #family

The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick. ↗

— John J. Niven

#dislike-for-children #humor #family

And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you’ll be playing with the neighbor’s puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll start hiccupping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor’s house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you’ll shriek and start laughing again. It will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring. ↗

— Ted Chiang

#family #happiness #love #short-story #family

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#duty #parents #life

If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums. ↗

— Kyo Maclear

#children-s-books #dreams #happiness #imagination #kids-books

Sebastian it is. You can tell me what a patron saint is later, since I have no knowledge of such things. Sebastian Kane. "Sebastian Kane Cannon. You're going to marry me and use my last name, right?" "Is that supposed to be a proposal? ↗

— Christine Feehan

#children #humor #marriage-proposal #humor

Add children to the list of things I hate. ↗

— Lauren Morrill

#humor #humor

Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love. ↗

— Thomas M. Disch

#flowers #humor #love #humor

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. ↗

— Tim Kreider

#humor #parent #humor

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#identity #kundera #love