A Family Matter Quotes

“You will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognise some of the people you have been.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“She cannot say, you cannot die, not now, because I will sometimes want to call you, to tell you a joke I read in the paper, or that I saw a famous person on the platform at London Bridge. You cannot die, because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven’t happened yet—the children grown up, graduations, weddings, their babies. Maggie knows you cannot tell someone they are not permitted to die, no matter how reasonable the request.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“you will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognize some of the people you have been.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“she loves them most when they are asleep. You cannot get parenting wrong when they are asleep,”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“I am sad beyond all normal sadness.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“It is her job to remember the things, even though the children aren’t babies any more, even though Conor is a grown man quite capable of managing harder tasks than reading the carpool rota for himself. Still, she will do it, keep them all moving forward. Keep them all on track.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“Five years ago”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“Nothing needs to change”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“reminds herself that she is a finished person.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“Maggie will live with this now, the anticipation of grief, for all the months and years it will take. The time before has already gone. The time when everything was simply fine.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“”There were times when Maggie’s straightforwardness was misunderstood as insensitivity. She took this as a failure on the other person‘s part rather than as a hint to self -moderate.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“He wants to say, you will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognize some of the people you have been.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“If you have time to worry about other people’s problems, you have few enough of your own.’ He”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“The fluke of being born at a slightly different time”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“She could howl”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“as if her grief was contagious”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“The feeling, on the day Maggie was born, that she mattered at last, that she was needed in the world. The amazement she felt watching each new version of her, walking, talking, Maggie becoming herself. When Dawn actually talked about herself she noticed, for the first time, that there were no spaces in her life, no gaps between school and work, or home and marriage. There hadn’t been time for her to live through anything that might become a story worth telling.”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“That is my daughter observing me at Christmas”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“She cannot say”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“She doesn’t know”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“This”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“As if being raised by just your dad is the next rung up from being raised by wolves. As if a father and daughter living alone was so unusual it had to be mentioned”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“He has not done enough”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“He has been divorced for so many more years than he’d been married. There should be a word for that. There probably was”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“If you have time to worry about other people’s problems”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“I don’t want to sleep with anyone else”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“As she puts on her coat”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“I’ve always thought the ‘Pick Your Own Strawberries’ signs sound a bit bossy,” Hazel says. “Sort of”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“The gym is full of people in their long-loved bodies”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter

“Sometimes Maggie has to fight the urge to say to this boy who knows next to nothing”
― Claire Lynch, A Family Matter