Jane Smiley Quotes

We're fortunate in my family because we really have three families: my brother, David, and me; the two boys, Cooper and Marston, from my dad's second marriage; and my dad's wife, Crystal.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Is a family just the strict definition of a small and discrete unit, or is it about the larger organic group that inevitably grows up around the smaller one?

I was an only child, but then my parents resettled with different partners, and I am now one of six.

When everything kind of hit the fan, my dad married Jo Anne, and suddenly there were five kids from the Ripleys and five kids from the Doughertys. Then my dad and Joanne had a baby. I usually have to make a diagram.

My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.

Family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.

I've got two families.

The mother-in-law is the centre of a family.

My parents got divorced when I was 2, so I have this weird thing where I have 8 brothers and sisters, but I am also an only child.

We're all a big hippie family so I got five sisters and a bunch of different mothers. Not really, but my sisters' mothers are all good friends with my mother. We're a big family, 25 people.

I have three sisters, that's it for the family.

I have six brothers and sisters. My mother has six kids from two different marriages. And we would just sit around making fun of each other's dad, and all our dads had real problems.

My family big as hell, man.

I grew up with my mom, and my mom had six kids, and I was the youngest, but I had a different father than my brothers and sisters, and I only met him when I was ten years old. Then he introduced me to his other children.

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.

I think we are defined as human beings through our families, no matter what kind of family - through our relationships with parents, brothers and sisters.

I'm one of three brothers.

I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.

Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures.

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

We don't have the family organization the way we used to. My father lives with us because we have the room. The greatest of all opportunities for our children is a complete family unit.

I write about families. That is who we are.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.