THE POWER OF LOVE

'When we talk about the problem of the art of monstrous men, we are really talking about a larger problem - the problem of human love. The question "what do we do with the art?" is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful? The problem is that you still love her. How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It's the problem and it's the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behaviour, the disappointments, the antrums, the betrayals.

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They're unchosen monsters. How random it all seems, when you really consider it. And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway.

When I was young, I believed in the perfectibility of humans. I believed that the people I loved should be perfect and I should be perfect too. That's not quite how love works.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.256.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DESTROY

'If you destroy the ideal of the "gentle man" and remove from men all expectations of courtesy and consideration towards women and children, you have prepare the way for an epidemic of rape and abuse. If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between these two people but as a bond between these two people and their forbears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.125.

ADOLESCENCE

'We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible it us; intelligible, but of not interest because we longer care whether peace reigns in the house or not. Now we are able to follow the ins and outs of family rows and to foresee their course and how long they will last; and we are are not afraid of them any more, doors slam ad we do not jump. The house is no longer what it was for us before, it is no longer the point from which we look out on the rest of the universe, it is a place where - by chance - we eat and live: we eat quickly, lending our inattentive ear to the adults' conversation - a conversation which is intelligible to us but which strikes us as useless; eat and quickly escape to our rooms so that we don't have to listen to their useless conversation, and we are able to be perfectly happy even if the adults around us are arguing and sulking day in day out. The things that matter to us no longer happen within the walls of our house but outside, in the street and at school; we feel that we cannot be happy if the other children at school look down on us in any way. We would do anything to escape their contempt; and we do anything.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.121.

CHURCH IS FAMILY

'A church true to Jesus will organize congregational life around the family of believers and order domestic life toward God's kingdom.'

Darrin W Synder Belousek, Marriage, Scripture, and the Church, p.83. 

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

'...constructing an identity is not a self-contained project. One's sense of self is a fluctuating assemblage of beliefs and feelings strongly influenced by external circumstances, especially the beliefs of other people.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.67. 

DEATH CANNOT HOLD THEM

'How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond  doubt that they still live in us.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.21. 

WHAT WORK DOES TO FAMILIES

'To be unhappy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.'
Samuel Johnson in David Gibson, Destiny, p.64. 

THE PROBLEM WITH FAMILY LIKENESS

'Vi loved her mother, but was too much like her not to get irritated after fifteen minutes.' 

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices, p.104. 

THE CHALLENGE OF FAMILY LIKENESSES

'Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearnings and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes - ah! so like our mother's - averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage - the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility of harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand - galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass, as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.83.

THE PATTERNS OF LOVE

'Arnold, after yawning twice, got up and went into the house. Stretched out on the bed in his room, with the Venetian blinds closed, he began to compare the life of the Talbots with his own well-ordered but childless and animalless life in town. Everywhere they go, he thought, they leave tracks behind them, like people walking in the snow. Paths crisscrossing, lines that are perpetually meeting: the mother's loving pursuit of the youngest, the man's love for his daughter, the dog's love for the man, the two boys;' preoccupation with each other. Wheels and diagrams, Arnold said to himself. The patterns of love.' 

William Maxwell, 'The Patterns of Love' in Over by the River  and Other Stories, p.81. 

GRANDPARENTAL LOVE

'oh, if she could have a tall glass of this child every morning, she would live forever. Sometimes she worried that her love for Edgar was too strong, a covetous earthly love, a love against God, a love to reclaim lost things. But what love wasn't like that? What love wasn't a reward to counter an old wrong? Anyway, it wasn't something she could control. How she felt about the boy was how she felt. Love was love, and it was always a monster.' 

Victor Lodato, Edgar & Lucy, p.18. 

WHAT BAPTISM TEACHES US ABOUT FAMILIES

'Our promises in baptism - as parents and congregation - signal that what counts as "family" is not just the closed, nuclear unit that is so often idolized as "the family." Thus, if Christian congregations are truly going to live out of and into the significance of baptism, they will need to become communities in which the bloodlines of kin are trumped by the blood of Christ - where "natural" families don't fold into themselves in self-regard.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.116. 

HAPPY FAMILIES

'The dream, or nightmare, of the happy family, haunts us all; it is one of the few Utopian ideas we have, these days.' 

Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy, p.101. 

FAMILY

'I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.'

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p.242.

MARRIAGE & FAMILY

'Christians do not believe marriage and family exist for themselves, but rather serve the ends of the more determinative community called church. The assumption that the family is an end in itself can only make the family and marriage more personally destructive. When families exist for no reason other than their own existence, they become quasi-churches, which ask sacrifices far too great for insufficient reasons.' 

Stanley Hauerwas in Christine O Colon and Bonnie E Field, Singled Out, p.221. 

LIQUOR

'Blood is thicker than liquor.'
Wendell Berry, 'Thicker than Liquor' in That Distant Land, p.150.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that children are better off when quarreling parents divorce, that broken homes are just as functional as intact ones, and that cohabitation has no influence on the stability of the consequent marriage. As anyone conversant with the field now knows, newer and more careful studies show all that to be wildly false. A young, untenured family sociologist who I know used to circulate the results of these new studies secretly among other scholars. But he asked me and his other friends never to mention his name. Why? Because calling the mirage a mirage is a good way to end a career.' 

J Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex, p.13. 

FAMILY

'Since the beginning of his consciousness he has felt over and around him the regard of that fellowship of kinsmen and friends, watching him, warning him, correcting him, teasing him, instructing him, not so much because of any ambition they have for him as because of where he comes from and because in him they see, come back again, traits and features of dead men and women they loved.' 

Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack, p.107. 

FAMILY

'If a man could understand himself and his own family, Bruce thought, he'd have a good start toward understanding everything he'd ever need to know.'

Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, p.436. 

FAMILY

'A family tragedy, past or present, is a magnetic field of everlasting, imploring questions.'

Eudora Welty, What there is to Say we have Said, p.361.