Kinship Quotes

“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."

(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)”
― Adrienne Rich

“Kinship– not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not “a man for others”; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Languages are not strangers to on another.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“The Ashanti, he reminded me, are guided by, and survive through, the forces of kinship and ancestral linkage. "We take care of each other on earth," he said. "If a family member asks for help, I give it. When a family member needs money for school fees or hospital bills, I send it. And my whole extended family loves you as if you are their child. We take care of each other's children. We raise each other's children. My cousins are my brothers and sisters. My aunts are also my mothers. Your aunts are your mothers, especially Auntie Harriet because she is my eldest sister. You will never be alone in this world."

"And do you really believe our ancestors are watching over us?" I asked.

He smiled. "I believe in the power of remembrance," he said. "And I believe love does not die with the body.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Are not friends and sworn brothers as important as blood-brothers? A true friend will know your heart, and hear the roar of running waters and the distant wind over the mountains in the song of your zither, without any need for you to speak aloud.”
― Aliette de Bodard, On a Red Station, Drifting

“We’re stubborn people, queer folks and Indians and queer Indians alike. Green shoots rise quickly from burnt-over earth—and rarely, if ever, in solitude.”
― Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

“Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling.”
― J. Howard Moore, Ethics and Education

“She suddenly understood the thought experiments better based on this feeling, the uncanniness of someone you love being able to abruptly articulate a single feeling. Friendship, family, and romance breed a telepathy that comes from kinship.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Many people cross our paths either by choice or through Kinship. Those who are not meant to be part of our lives will leave but those with who add value to our lives will remain.”
― Nadine Sadaka Boulos

“Foster kinship over skinship.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Gente Mente Adelante: Prejudice Conquered is World Conquered

“The authority in such a clan-society is of a peculiar sort, it is here, it is there, it is
everywhere, and it never sleeps. But there is no absolutely dominant power. The circle may perhaps have its leader in chief, but he cannot force anyone to his will. In Iceland, this lack of subordination appears in the crudest light. Iceland had men who gladly paid out of their own purse for the extravagances of their restless kinsmen, if only they could maintain peace and prevent futile bloodshed; but their peacemaking was an everlasting patchwork. There was no
power over those who did not seek the right. To take firm action against them was a thing even the most resolute of their kin could never do, for it was out of the question for the clan to disown its unruly members and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. When Chrodin, a man of noble stock, was chosen, for his cleverness and god-fearing ways, to be majordomo in Austria, he declined with these significant words: “I cannot bring about peace in Austria, chiefly
because all the great men in the country are my kinsmen. I cannot overawe them and cannot have any one executed. Nay, because of their very kinship they will rise up and act in defiance.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other life forms. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.”
― Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

“Many people cross our paths either by choice or through Kinship. Those who are not meant to be part of our lives will leave but those who add value to our lives will remain.”
― Nadine Sadaka Boulos

“For the first time in more than thirty years, Nicholas wanted the company of his blood—not the amicable converse of friendship, not the parley of a lover, but the marrow-talk of kin and consanguinity”
― Edward Docx, Pravda

“Beauty lies in kinship of heart, not skinship of body.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“Slimness is not the same as fitness, Skinship is not the same as kinship.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Relationships, whether love or kinship, break where they are; otherwise, a stranger is not in any relationship.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“We each live in a tiny pool of light, and around us lies the darkness of our un-seeing. We see what we look for and what we look at. (...) It is not possible to see the world we live in, only minute, shuttered portions of it where the beam of our attention falls. When I was a teenager, I noticed other teenagers. Pregnant, I suddenly saw all the pregnant women; then the babies; and then the world was full of small children and their exhausted parents; full of single mothers . . . No I see countless people who are frail and scared -- but that's only because I saw my father so frail and so scared.”
― Nicci Gerrard, The Last Ocean: A Journey through Memory and Forgetting

“Peace is the ability to see that it is not a crossing but a meeting of one another where kinship overrides differences. Peace is the ability to meet one another at a place of understanding.”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“- Får jag påminna dig om att du inte ens kände honom för några dagar sedan?
- Det är mitt blod som rinner i hans ådror, så om jag säger att han är genom hederlig ber jag dig att inte tvivla på det”
― Marc Levy

“I wasn’t asking to be admitted to the family. Or was I? I wasn’t kin and he didn’t owe me anything. Or did he? The questions were not just about myself but about all people who are, to a greater or lesser extent, shaky arrivals, showing up unannounced, trying to migrate into a kind of safety or homecoming. Some of us stood outside the door campaigning for admittance, and some of us were thinking It’s a minuscule country, for God’s sake, how many more can we fit? And every one of us was related.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“When she notices my silence she goes quiet and sighs. I guess she, too, gets fed up with the weight of incomprehension. I guess that on top of seeming like a sister who is detached, dejected and discourteous, I also come off as an arrogant person. Kinship isn't enough for her, either, of course it isn't. In cases like ours, getting along isn't a question of magic or chemistry or affinity, but of tenacity, toughness and torturous toiling.”
― Margarita García Robayo, La encomienda

“Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin ; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess. The ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature ; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious.”
― Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles