J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

Families just have so many secrets and dysfunctions.

Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.

My father is the reason I am the way I am today. He's why I acted up and he's why I prayed to be the opposite of him. We made up before he died but I vowed to never raise my kids like how he raised me.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

'Fall on Your Knees' is really a story about secrets and family, and the idea that there are some stories or truths that need to be expressed.

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.

Vincente understood all too well what was happening to Liza; he had gone through it 40 years earlier with my mother.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

My dad is so unique in what he does. It's not like I'm taking a torch from him and doing his thing. I hope I've carried from him a little bit of a sense of irony, a little bit of a wink.

I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!

I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won't break.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

We started the family Bible after slavery was abolished. My great-grandmother remembered the Bible being started, which meant that she was a slave as a young girl. When she died, the Bible was at least 105 years old, so she must have been nearly 115 years old. Her daughter, my grandmother, died at 97, and her husband at 98.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

I sort of take cues from my grandparents.

Both my grandfathers and my mother's brother were musicians.

My mum came from an incredibly big family.

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.