Genetic Connection Quotes

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 yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

When you meet kin, there is an energy and sparkle between your bodies. It must be chemical somehow - DNA and genes.

I didn't grow up with my dad, so it was always very funny to me, and always has been, what an important part DNA plays in one's life.

Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas.

I haven't actually checked my family tree, but Rutherford is a very old Scottish name, so I've probably got Scottish genes a few generations back.

My adoptive mother always wanted to meet my biological mother.

It's not like I want to hop on a bandwagon, because I said it 15 years ago - bringing a child into your life who is not genetically yours is one of the most beautiful things you can do. But I'm also interested in having my own baby, too.

Vee is my un-twin. She's green-eyed, milky blond, and a few pounds over curvy. I'm a smoky-eyed brunette with volumes of curly hair that holds its own against even the best flatiron. And I'm all legs, like a bar stool. But there is an invisible thread the ties us together; both of us swear that tie began long before birth. Both of us swear it will continue to hold for the rest of our lives.

Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

It's a twin type of telepathy. My sister and I, we share the same DNA, so on paper, we're the same person. I knew she was pregnant, like, right away - it's so crazy - but I asked her, and she said yes.

I love this child. Red-haired - patient and gentle like her mother - fey and funny like her father. When she giggles I can hear him when he and I were young. I am part of this child. It may be only because we share genes and that therefore smell familiar to each other.... It may be that a part of me lives in her in some important way.... But for now, it's jelly beans and 'Old MacDonald' that unite us.

In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant-what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.

In the very traits of his temperament, which have a considerable effect on his life of soul, a person bears within him qualities and impulses that have an obvious connection with those of his physical ancestors.

If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

The thing about members of your family is that if you met them for the first time at a party, you might not bother to take their phone number, and yet something binds you.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.

He was clearly related to Declan: same nose, same dark eyebrows, same phenomenal teeth. But there was a carefully cultivated sense of danger to this Lynch brother. This was not a rattlesnake hidden in the grass, but a deadly coral snake striped with warning colors. Everything about him was a warning: If this snake bit you, you had no one to blame but yourself.

The idea that you're made up of the people that come before you and you somehow have some kind of conscious dialog with your genetics - I think it's really deep and interesting stuff.

We’ve got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We’ve got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We’ve got thirty per cent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.

I was really close with Rob Ryan, so I know that Rex, being his twin, would be very similar to him.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

Genetically, I'm like my mum, and she looked great right up until her death in 1989.