#relatives

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes. ↗

— Keith Henson

#best #captured #dying #escape #fighting

Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with. ↗

— Oliver Hudson

#about #blood #choose #family #life

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? ↗

— Alice Sebold

#relationships #relatives #family

Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#alive #because #committed #companionship #had

I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it. ↗

— Queen Latifah

#birthdays #close #closest #couple #cousins

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions. ↗

— Bob Balaban

#boring things #charging #come #creating #fascinating

My sister and I were born in San Francisco. When our parents died, we came down here to live with relatives. ↗

— Freddy Fender

#came #died #down #francisco #here

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives. ↗

— Ron Chernow

#angry #back #dead #developed #i

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition. ↗

— Stanislav Grof

#authentic #convincing #dead #death #deathbed

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#language #perfection #relatives #death