I had no blood relatives till I made some.
Plenty of people are intrigued by their family history. Growing up as the son of West Indian immigrants who moved to London in the 1950s and 60s, I was especially fascinated by anecdotes about the lives of my Guyanese relatives, which seemed a million miles away from Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate.
The colorful state of Gujrat celebrates hundreds of festivals every year. Makar Sankranti or Uttarayan is one of the biggest festivals amongst them. Thousands of colorful kites decorate the sky and several rooftops crowded with friends and relatives fly them with unending enthusiasm.
When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul’s old city alone. It’s hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.
I can’t think of any relatives that ever went into science.
My mom is from New Orleans. And all of my maternal relatives were there during Katrina. We couldn’t even find my uncle for four months. We literally didn’t know where he was. I had been there just four days before the storm hit.
Did you hear the one about the elderly Jew on his deathbed who sent for a priest, after declaring to his astonished relatives that ‘I want to convert.’ Asked why he would become a Catholic, after living all his life as a Jew, he answered: ‘Better one of them should die than one of us.’
I came to Hong Kong when I was five, but we didn’t have any relatives in Hong Kong. My mom is a big movie fan, and she watched all kinds of movies, so when I was a kid, basically, we went to watch a movie every day.
Coming home for me isn’t, like, one family dinner. It’s about am I gonna see 50 relatives, or am I gonna see 85?
Friends and relatives might be surprised that I think of myself as lonely. I’m married to a man I not only love but like, and we spend a lot of time together. If I feel like socializing, I can usually find someone to meet for coffee or a drink.
I was born in Iran, which has a predominantly Muslim population, and I have relatives who are devout Muslims, so I know what it means to be judged based on your appearance and what you’re wearing. But your ethnicity and your clothing do not define who you are.
In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations – foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint.
If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.
We all want to see a world where a preventable and treatable disease no longer takes lives or prevents women and girls from attending school or work because they have to care for ill relatives.
When I go to Ohio to visit relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of casual dismissal offered up by way of discussion.
It felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and the ecological crisis. My parents didn’t care about it, my classmates didn’t care about it, my relatives didn’t care about this. I mean nobody I knew cared about this and I felt like I was the only one.
I was born in Iran, which has a predominantly Muslim population, and I have relatives who are devout Muslims, so I know what it means to be judged based on your appearance and what you’re wearing. But your ethnicity and your clothing do not define who you are.
When I used to visit my relatives’ places in Hyderabad, I would keep seeing the posters of Telugu films. It’s not a different world for me.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn’t seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.
It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.
World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.
Not all of us were lucky enough to be born into a huge Lebanese family, where visiting relatives and being stuffed with copious amounts of pickles, hummus, felafel and kibbeh is not just a way of life but a birth right.
Relatives cannot help you in the studios. You stand or fall by your own efforts.
I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.
On Sunday, we will Skype relatives – my brother lives in America, my best friend is in Canada, and Ryan’s family are all in Australia.
Youngsters in Punjab have a borrowed mindset, music and fashion sense from Canada and Hollywood because a large number of our relatives are settled abroad.
People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban. They’re also people like we all are. They have families, they have relatives, they have children, they are suffering a tough time.
I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the ’80s. When it’s that close to you, you can’t really deny it, and you can’t run from it.
I was born there and I moved away in 1990 when I was seven years old. After that my family moved away from there to Delhi and Mumbai. Now, only a handful of relatives live in Kashmir and we are constantly worried about them. It pains me to see that my birth-place is not a safe place to be in anymore.
When one has love for God, one doesn’t feel any physical attraction to wife, children, relatives and friends. One retains only compassion for them.
If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.
I love my family, I love my relatives. One special request I have is for the media back in Taiwan to kind of give them their space because they can’t even go to work without being bombarded and people following them.
I have conservative relatives. I maintain some relationships with some conservatives going back to the 1990s… Not in any meaningful way.
Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.
So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.
I can still remember watching Italy win the 1982 World Cup. I was just an eight-year-old kid in Naples, my hometown, watching the games with a bunch of people in the houses of relatives and friends. I can recall that when Italy scored, we would shout and hug, even though we did not all know each other.
The best part of visiting Calcutta is definitely the food and seeing my relatives who I don’t get to see often enough. The worst is the pollution and traffic.
I lost relatives to AIDS. A couple of my closest cousins, favorite cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the ’80s. When it’s that close to you, you can’t – you know, you can’t really deny it, and you can’t run from it.
Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.
Feel what you feel, know what you know, and set your relatives free to do the same.
The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.
I’ve never been a fan of loans between relatives or friends. They can divide relationships.
Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession.
I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I’m speaking with my relatives. I don’t think it’s very difficult for me to switch between each language because I’ve been doing it for so long.
It’s hard not to be impressed by my older relatives.
I was really young, just playing with puppets a lot and doing all the voices and acting it out – normal kid stuff. But then I’d hear my mother talking about it to her relatives, marveling at it as if it was something unique. And it made me realize, ‘Oh, maybe I do have a talent for something.’
If God has given you the world’s goods in abundance, it is to help you gain those of Heaven and to be a good example of sound teaching to your sons, servants, and relatives.
People favouring their relatives more than an outsider is what the biggest fight in democracy is, let it be in film industry or politics.
