I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.

Ah, my dad's whistle. On holidays when I was a kid, we would all be off in the rock pools along the beach. When it came time to go, we'd hear the whistle and we'd all come running. Like dogs!

My mom's one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

I had a really wonderful upbringing. We were a tight family. It was wonderful to grow up with so many siblings. We were all just a year or two apart, and we were always so supportive of each other. I...

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

I think that when you're queer, you grow up with these kinds of men who might have made you feel small because of who you are. They could be part of your family, or somebody on the street, or a...

My favorite holiday memory was sitting at home all day in my pajamas during winter break for school watching a bunch of old Christmas movies like 'Jack Frost' and 'Rudolph the Red - Nosed Reindeer'...

My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my...

My mom was really cool.

My parents have lived longer than most and have expected very little. We have been blessed in too many ways to count.

Just because a child doesn't have both parents raising him or her, doesn't mean that child becomes half the person they were meant to be. One wonderful parent can love enough for two, and love will...

Family is the most important thing in this life.

There is a black-and-white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy, and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming...

The Brotherhood and the Band of Bastards had to go try and make peace. And he had to go look his brother in the face. -

People always stay the age that they died at. My big brother died of leukemia when I was six. He was eight. Now when I think of him, he's always eight, and he's still my big brother. He never changes,...

... a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no...

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the...

If there were more men like you, Mr. Wooster, London would be a better place.This was dead opposite to my Aunt Agatha's philosophy of life, she always having rather given me to understand that it is...

We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going...

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.

As I walk behind her down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a...

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding...

He seemed, while I was skating in the center of the pond, that the number of stars I could see had multiplied. They were scattered dense as a throttle of Bucaneve.

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a...

And like that, the decades disappeared and the memory of that night came to life again. The way John had known it would. He didn't fight it, didn't work to stay in the here and now. If he was going to...

This last year... I learned something about family. Like it's not about blood alone. It's being connected... it's growing up together and loving each other. It's believing in the same God and knowing...

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true...