The Family Quotes

“Prayer is an acknowledgement of fear, of that which cannot be controlled or contained or even understood. It is a surrender and an attack, all at once.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“Death is indiscriminate. Death does not come knocking and ask who is least needed. It does not notice if you have a family; it does not care that you are one of the gears that turns the very world. Death does not take the slowest, the weakest, those separated from the pack. It reaches its hands into the heart. It pulls out something essential. It does not ask you to continue on, but you do anyway. You cannot help it.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“Loss is like that. The world shimmers in and out of focus: one moment it is the place you live in, and the next it is utterly foreign, and you cannot even breathe the air.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“And the mammas sit pressed together in one kitchen or another, sipping their wine and laughing, sometimes, and crying, others, and of course, they know when their daughters fall asleep, because they can still feel the shapes of those daughters turning against the insides of their bellies.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“The danger of complacency is that it makes you tired. It makes you dull. It distracts you from the heat as the water around you begins to boil.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“If one’s soul is warm with love and one’s house is full of family and beloved trinkets and fragrant smells and one’s work is satisfying; if one sleeps well at night and eats well during the day and the muscles in one’s hands and feet do not cramp up, winter can be a welcome means by which to narrow the world down to the most important parts.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“Sofia has found she is living with hardly any concrete responsibilities, but innumerable unwritten expectations.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“How strange it is, to live in an entirely different world from the people with whom you once spent every day.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“How destabilizing, to question the motives of someone who has always been your compass. How isolating, to wonder if despite your family ties and the friendship promises and oaths of trust you swore, you are alone after all.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“They talked about the future, which always means talking about the past.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“arancini”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“It had caused him physical pain to collect his wife and his son and bundle them onto a boat to a new country, where they would never again feel the warm Sicilian dirt between their toes; where they would lose the ability to tell what time of year it was by the quality of the light, by the melody of the cicadas; where they would forget the old dialect in favor of hybridized American-Italian syntax that would be neither American nor Italian.”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family

“Mama, I think I'll see you soon." - Saul Colicchio”
― Naomi Krupitsky, The Family