Feuding Family Quotes

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.

He felt a bit like Romeo to her Juliet, minus the feuding families and poison. And with pigeons.

There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover... Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations ... I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.

You know I love a good family feud and I carry a big stick.

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't.

My brothers are idiots. Anyone can see that under the scars and the attitude, Isabeau is more fragile than she looks. And as a reclusive Hound princess, her first introduction to the royal family shouldn’t be a dose of Hypnos and four idiots gawking at her. If I’d managed not to gawk, they sure as hell could have. She was beautiful, fierce, and utterly unlike anyone I’d ever known. It was really hard not to gawk. Much better to pace outside her door with one of our Bouviers sitting at the top of the stairs watching me curiously. “This sucks, Boudicca,” I told her. “I don’t think we inherited Dad’s diplomacy.” She laid her chin on her paws. I could have sworn she rolled her eyes.

There’s a reason Mia is currently an only child. Family drama takes on a whole new meaning when they’re feuding gods who can’t stand the sight of each other and always try to kill one another whenever they’re in the same room.” – Kat

In one sense, the Qur’an regards the Torah and the Gospel as older siblings— and looks on with dismay at the family feud tearing apart Abrahamic cohesion. In another sense, the Qur’an exists as an orphan. It presents the first Abrahamic scripture in Arabic, delivered by an Arabian prophet. Claiming a lineage back to the Torah yet revealed in a thoroughly pagan society, the Qur’an enjoys an insider-outsider status—one that empowers it to look lovingly yet critically at its ancestry. This complex inheritance means the Qur’an is aware of its roots yet free to develop its own identity without being confined by parental oversight.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself he smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons. Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations...I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.

People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.

Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds.

It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes. But, so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and Power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patters that turn into tribunals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.0

You know those tragic stories where two kids from feuding families fall in love? Okay, flip that inside out and turn it on its head and you’ve got our story, Ryder’s and mine.

I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, & every war has to me the horror of a family feud. I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man & the service of all to all. The only fighting that saves is the one that helps the world toward liberty, justice & an abundant life for all.

I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, & every war has to me the horror od a family feud. I look upon the true patriotism as the brotherhood of man & the service to of all to all. The only fighting that saves is the one that helps the world toward liberty, justice & an abundant life for all.

Enough was enough. In this moment, Juliette decided she did not care. This was a war they had never asked to be a part of; this was a war that had dragged them in before they had the chance to leave. Roma and Juliette had been born into feuding families, into a feuding city, into a country already fractured beyond belief. She was washing her hands of it. She was not fighting for love. She was protecting her own, everyone else’s be damned.

Southerners. Such literate, civilized folk, such charm and cleverness and passion for living, such genuine interest in people, all people, high and low, white and black, and yet how often it had come to, came to, was still coming to vicious incomprehension, usually over race but other things too - religion, class, money. How often the lowest elements had burst out of the shadows and hollers, guns and torches blazing, galloping past the educated and tolerant as nightriders, how often the despicable had run riot over the better Christian ideals... how often cities had burned, people had been strung up in trees, atrocities had been permitted to occur and then, in the seeking of justice for those outrages, how slippery justice had proven, how delayed its triumph. Oh you expect such easily obtained violence in the Balkans or among Asian or African tribal peoples centuries-deep in blood feuds, but how was there such brutality and wickedness in this place of church and good intention, a place of immense friendliness and charity and fondness for the rituals of family and socializing, amid the nation's best cooking and best music... how could one place contain the other place?

It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community? It doesn't mean it's easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because you're not going to go away. It also means commitment to bear witness, and engaging in 'casserole diplomacy' by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitment are real. They are tangible. They are not esoteric or idealistic, but rooted in the bedrock existence of where we choose to maintain our lives. That way we begin to know the predictability of a place. We anticipate a species long before we see them. We can chart the changes, because we have a memory of cycles and seasons; we gain a capacity for both pleasure and pain, and we find the strength within ourselves and each other to hold these lines. That's my definition of family. And that's my definition of love.

I also realized that in my family drama a very limited number of character traits were available to the players. In my mind, either I could be weak, wimpy, submissive, and pathetic, or I could be a raging tyrant and bully who demanded total compliance from everyone in my realm. The notion of being strong and assertive while staying calm, insisting on appropriate boundraries and on being treated with respect and dignity, were not in my realm of experience. Once I realized that I was much happier with the person I was in the rest of my life, I realized it was foolish not to be that "me" around my family as well. I began to feel liberated and genuinely felt they could take the new me or leave it. So far, they've chosen to leave it, but I feel a sense of integrity and self-respect that I had never experienced before.

The feud, if that was what you could call it, lasted for years and bled into their day-to-day lives. There were fences that William Doyle was sure Randy Cutter had damaged and calls to the sheriff about wayward cattle. And there was Ethan’s friendship with Randy’s son, Brock. That didn’t sit well with either family.

Last year, it cost the British taxpayers $57.8 million to maintain its royal family,” wrote Robert Keith Gray in Presidential Perks Gone Royal. “During that same year, it cost American taxpayers some $1.4 billion to house and serve the Obamas in the White House, along with their families, friends and visiting campaign contributors.

I pledge my life to the Hunting Lodge. I vow to serve all seven clans as my own, To protect them from what lies beyond. I forsake all blood ties and blood feuds, To offer up my name and my past. The Hunters are my family now and always. I swear before them that I will never lower my weapons In the face of darkness, Nor allow tyranny to rise.

The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.

We feed the soil with our blood, our endless feuding,” he said after a time. “We always have, but that does not mean we always should. I have shown that a tribe can come from the Quirai, the Wolves, the Woyela, the Naimans. We are one people, Arslan. When we are strong enough, I will make them come to me, or I will break them one at a time. I tell you we are one people. We are Mongols, Arslan. We are the silver people and one khan can lead us all.” “You are drunk, or dreaming,” Arslan replied, ignoring his son’s discomfort. “What makes you think they would ever accept you?” “I am the land,” Temujin replied. “And the land sees no difference in the families of our people.

He was pretty good at Family Feud. It was his favorite game show because, unlike, say, Jeopardy! or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, you didn't actually have to know anything, you just had to be able to guess what people thought the answer was.

The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state. Throughout history, most violence resulted from local feuds between families and communities. (Even today, as the above figures indicate, local crime is a far deadlier threat than international wars.)

Carey was shaking his head. “No. It’s the transfer of the duty of revenge to the Queen. It’s the officers of the Crown avenging a man’s murder, not the man’s father or the family. Without law what you have is feud, tangling between themselves, and murder repaying murder

Many immigrant families I met in Papineau brought with them lingering animosities from their country of origin, but they accepted that Canada was a place where people come to escape old-world feuds, not to nurture them. So what does multiculturalism mean to these people—and to me? It means a presumption that society will accommodate forms of cultural expression that do not violate our society’s core values. These include the right of a Jew to wear his kippa, a Sikh to wear his turban, a Muslim to wear her headscarf, or a Christian to wear a cross pendant.

I hear it was the fact that the Brennans had a hellfireanddamnation preacher runnin' their family back in Prohibition days and you Gallaghers were runnin' moonshine to get by and got caught. Your family blamed the Brennans for rattin' you out, and that started a feud," Rosalie said.

Papaw’s distant cousin—also Jim Vance—married into the Hatfield family and joined a group of former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers called the Wildcats. When Cousin Jim murdered former Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy, he kicked off one of the most famous family feuds in American history.

This had always pissed him off about Romeo and Juliet, its ending platitude that at least the feud was laid to rest and the fighting families had come together as if this somehow made it worth losing their teenagers. As if Romeo and Juliet would have been willing to die just so their parents would get along.

You know those tragic stories where two kids from feuding families fall in love? Okay, flip that inside out and turn it on its head and you’ve got our story, Ryder’s and mine. It all began like this: On April 6, 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh, Captain Jeremiah D. Marsden--that’s Ryder’s ancestor--took a minié ball in the left kneecap. Corporal Lewiston G. Cafferty--that’s mine--picked up Captain Marsden and carried him off the field of battle to safety. On his back. More than a mile. Barefoot. At least, that’s how the story goes. Frankly, I’m a little skeptical, but whatever. The point is, the Marsdens and the Caffertys have been like this ever since.

In many instances, politics was the cover for personal vendetta and family feud. Most of the right-wing terror was directed against those who had influenced the violence against the priests and the factory owners back in 1934 - union leaders, prominent anti-clericals, several Republican mayors. And yet - mechanics, butchers, doctors, builders, labourers, barbers - they too were 'taken for a walk', as the phrase came to be known. And it wasn't just men. Certain women who had become teachers under the Republic were removed, as were known anarchists' wives. None of it was legal, of course, but there seemed no means of stopping it, when hate and power were in play.

Can you imagine how different things would be if our families hated each other? If they were feuding like the First Methodists and the Cavalry Baptists?” “I bet it’d be a whole lot less complicated, to tell you the truth. Heck, we probably would’ve already run off together or something by now.” “Probably so,” I say, a smile tugging at my lips.

Glancing out my window, I hold up my finger and thumb, creating a little frame around Ryder Marsden, who stands outside on the lawn below. I close one eye to get the illusion just right and then pretend to squash him. Take that. I let the curtains fall back against the glass, effectively blocking the view of my nemesis standing there beneath the twinkle lights, looking way too hot in his charcoal-colored suit. It would be so much easier to hate him if he didn’t look so good. And I want to hate him; I really do. You know those tragic stories where two kids from feuding families fall in love? Okay, flip that inside out and turn it on its head and you’ve got our story, Ryder’s and mine.

Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.

Now many of us celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day (instead of or along with Thanksgiving, Turkey Day, Family Feud and/or Family Fun and Games). I see it as a day to learn more about the people whose land we stole (yes, even we whose forebearers came more recently, because we continue to benefit from the theft), and to sit in the complexity that is the building and continuation of our civilization.

They’re just so stupid,” he says, sighing. “In addition to this stupid, racist feud they have with your family, they’ve got all of these Make America Great Again posters plastered over our windows, and while we were in the living room watching a movie together, they just kept making really shitty homophobic comments. And I had enough.” He sighs again. “And you know, they had the nerve to threaten me, saying if I cost them the race tomorrow, they’ll send me to Texas to live with my grandparents.

Somehow she'd labeled those days a humiliation. She'd based her choices--her giant house, her daughters' schools, her constant attention to family life--on erecting a wall between her grim childhood and her bright future. But she was beginning to see that the camaraderie with her brother and sister, the yummy microwaved dinners, the way they'd crowd around the small TV to watch Family Feud, yelling out answers--in some ways, those days had been wonderful. She promised herself now: it will be okay.

Call it magic, call it a deep connection to the earth. It can be labeled many things, but the fact is that every woman in the Stevens line has had some special ability. Your great-grandmother, my grandma Emma, could bake pies that inspired people to tell the truth. One bite of her apple streusel crumb pie and a man would confess to an affair. A forkful of her peach cobbler and feuding siblings would apologize for their mistakes and make up. I'm told her cherry pie was especially popular for making shy beaus finally declare their true love and propose to their sweethearts.

Well, that was certainly a disgusting display worthy of your father's family." "Shut up, Ma," Lisa Livia said, her hands on her hips. "Like you weren't born in the Bronx, and the Fortunatos weren't a big step up for you. Now you listen to me. You try to move this wedding away from Two Rivers again, I'm gonna clean every skeleton out of every closet you got and make them dance, you hear me? I'll dig up everything you ever buried, including my daddy, and then I'll sink that beat-up rowboat you're living on so you'll be out in the street with nothing. Do not fuck with my kid and do not fuck with my friend, they are all the family I got, and they are off-limits to you. Understand?

When Myron opened the conference room door, Ned Tunwell charged like a happy puppy. He smiled brightly, shook hands, slapped Myron on the back. Myron half-expected him to jump in his lap and lick his face. Ned Tunwell looked to be in his early thirties, around Myron’s age. His entire persona was always upbeat, like a Hare Krishna on speed—or worse, a Family Feud contestant. He wore a blue blazer, white shirt, khaki pants, loud tie, and of course, Nike tennis shoes. The new Duane Richwood line. His hair was yellow-blond and he had one of those milk-stain mustaches. Ned finally calmed down enough to hold up a videotape. “Wait till you see this!” he raved. “Myron, you are going to love it. It’s fantastic.

If she dies, you’re all to blame,” he said, turning accusing eyes on his family and hers. “This damned feud has to stop. Here. Now. For good.” He turned his gaze to Sam and said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you. It was an accident, plain and simple. I love your sister and I am, by God, going to make her my wife.” He turned to the rest of them and said, “And we’re going to be showing up for the holidays, and you’d better damned well make us welcome.” Owen was crying, the tears streaming unashamedly town his face. “I love Bayleigh Creed. Do you hear me? I love her!” “I think everyone can hear you just fine,” Bay murmured. “Oh, God, Red,” he said, smiling down at her through the blur of tears. “I thought you were dying.” She lifted a shaky hand to her head, but he caught it before she could touch the wound. “My head hurts like hell. But I enjoyed the speech, Owe.

We're working on disrupting an old family tradition." He accepted the glass the Justice offered. "He means feud," Shelby explained at her mother's blank look. She sipped the liqueur,approved it, then sat on the arm of Myra's chair. "Oh...Oh," Deborah repeated as she remembered. "The Campbells and the MacGregors were blood enemies in Scotland-though I can't quite remember why." "They stole our land," Alan put in mildly. "That's what you say." Shelby shot him a look as she sipped again. "We acquired MacGregor land through a royal decree.They weren't good sports about it." Alan gave her a thoughtful smile. "I'd be interested to hear you debate that issue with my father." "What a match," Myra said, brightening at the thought. "Herbert,can you just see our Shelby nose-to-nose with Daniel? All that red hair and stubbornness. You really should arrange it, Alan." "I've been giving it some thought." "Have you?" Shelby's brows lifted to disappear completely under her frizz of bangs. "Quite a bit of thought," he said in the same even tone. "I've been to that wonderful anachronism in Hyannis Port." Myra gave Shelby a brief pat on the thigh. "It's right up your alley,dear.She's so fond of the-well,let's say unique,shall we?" "Yes." Deborah sent Shelby a fond smile. "I could never figure out why. But then,both of my children have always been a mystery.Perhaps it's because they're so bright and clever and restless.I'm always hoping they'll settle down." This time she beamed the smile at Alan. "You're not married, either,are you,Senator?" "If you'd like," Shelby said as she studied the color of her liqueur through the crystal, "I could just step out while you discuss the terms of the dowry." "Shelby,really," Deborah murmured over the sound of the Justice's chuckle.

Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought under the consistent administration of any single authority. Unification of Afghanistan has been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce in opposition to an invader. Thus what American and NATO forces met in the early twenty-first century was not radically different from the scene encountered by a young Winston Churchill in 1897: Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress ... Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.

A grown woman tasting a spoonful of Georgia's Mousse au Citron at a late afternoon lunch, then suddenly standing and announcing that she needed to reconcile with her estranged sister before it was too late. She'd hastened away, leaving her coat, one hundred euros to pay the bill, and the mostly uneaten mousse at the table. After devouring Georgia's beet and goat cheese tart one bitter winter evening, an American man with an engagement ring nestled on top of a slice of Georgia's cherry clafoutis looked across the table at his girlfriend and said later that he could suddenly see clearly that she was not the love of his life. He'd hastened back to the kitchen to remove the ring from the dessert where it was waiting to be served at the right moment. They left the restaurant with the ring in his pocket and his girlfriend in tears. There had been others. Many others, now that she thought of it. It had been a bit of a joke among the kitchen staff, that Georgia's dishes could cause more breakups and engagements and family feuds and reconciliations than the restaurant had ever seen. She'd never really put it all together before, but now that she thought of it... "I think my cooking might give people clarity somehow," Georgia said in surprise.

It doesn’t feel right. Not now.” “But you’re the same, Jemma. You haven’t changed. This is what you want, remember?” “See, that’s where you’re wrong. I have changed. And”--I shake my head--“I don’t even know what I want anymore.” He opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, but closes it just as quickly. A muscle in his haw flexes as he eyes me sharply, his brow furrowed. “I thought you were stronger than this,” he says at last. “Braver.” I start to protest, but he cuts me off. “When I get home, I’m going to e-mail you these video files. I don’t know anything about making films, but if you need any help, well…” He shrugs. “You know my number.” With that, he turns and walks away. I leap to the ground. “Ryder, wait!” He stops and turns to face me. “Yeah?” “I…about Patrick. And then…you and me. I feel awful about it. Things were so crazy during the storm, like it wasn’t real life or something.” I take a deep, gulping breath, my cheeks burning now. “I don’t want you think that I’m, you know, some kind of--” “Just stop right there.” He holds out one hand. “I don’t think anything like that, okay? It was…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Shit, Jemma. I’m not going to lie to you. It was nice. I’m glad I kissed you. I’m pretty sure I’ve been wanting to for…well, a long time now.” “You did a pretty good job hiding it, that’s for sure.” “It’s just that…well, I’ve had to listen to seventeen years’ worth of how you’re the perfect girl for me. And goddamn, Jem. My mom already controls enough in my life. What food I eat. What clothes I wear. Hell, even my underwear. You wouldn’t believe the fight she put up a few years back when I wanted to switch to boxer briefs instead of regular boxers.” I swallow hard, remembering the sight of him wearing the underwear in question. Yeah, I’m glad he won that particular battle. “Anyway, if my parents want it for me, it must be wrong. So I convinced myself that you were wrong for me. You had to be.” His gaze sweeps across my face, and I swear I feel it linger on my lips. “No matter what I felt every single time I looked at you.” Oh my God. I did the exact same thing--thinking he had to be wrong for me just because Mama insisted we were a perfect match. Now I don’t know what to think. What to feel. What’s real and what’s a trying-to-prove-something fabrication. But Ryder…he gets it. He’s lived it too. I let out a sigh. “Can you imagine how different things would be if our families hated each other? If they were feuding like the First Methodists and the Cavalry Baptists?” “I bet it’d be a whole lot less complicated, to tell you the truth. Heck, we probably would’ve already run off together or something by now.” “Probably so,” I say, a smile tugging at my lips.

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.

Abby could have landed the Pungent Barrel account if you guys hadn’t undersold her as a doghouse designer.” He could almost hear Marc flipping him the bird through the phone because he knew Tanner was right. They’d screwed up. Big-time. And Abby had lost out. “We’re considering calling Gabe, asking him to come home early and help deal with this whole Richard shitstorm,” Marc said, referring to the eldest DeLuca brother, who was currently vacationing in Italy with his wife and three daughters. “We as in you, Nate, and Trey?” Were they serious? “Because I guarantee you, there is no way Abby would agree to that. Bringing Gabe and his family back just in time for little Holly to see a naked statue of her father sounds like a complication Abby would want to avoid.” Richard hadn’t just slept with his interns—he’d gotten one pregnant, then abandoned her. By some weird twist of fate, Richard’s mistress, Regan, was now married to Gabe, making Richard’s love child Abby’s niece. And the rest of them one big, happy family. “Dick is still in her yard?” “Until Sunday.” “Sunday! That’s a long time to keep this from my nonna. Because if he’s still here when she gets home from her bachelorette party, all hell will break loose.” ChiChi had recently ended a sixty-year feud with their family’s biggest rival, Charles Baudouin, and the two were now planning a wedding, an event that ChiChi and her geriatric

deep pockets to be able to sustain a few years of losses.

The primary group is composed of people with whom you are intimately involved, including your immediate family and close friends.....Rivalries certainly occur among primary groups, such as the nineteenth-century blood feud between the Harfields and McCoys and the seemingly endless battle for the White House between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. (Rivalries are also common within families, but that's a topic for another books, or perhaps for therapy.) But rivalries are more often seen among secondary groups--the participants have chosen to identify with an institution or group, and in some way they are measuring themselves against an alternative that represents an opposing point of view.

But life in the Coast culture area was hardly idyllic. Warfare aimed at driving out or exterminating another lineage or family was an established practice in the northern portion of the region. Peoples to the south carried on feuds much more limited in violence and extent. After a successful attack, the northern warriors sometimes beheaded their victims, brought the heads home, and impaled them atop tall poles in front of their villages. Only

These people, they were different to anyone I’d met. They’d offered their friendship, their trust, without a second thought. I’d always been wary about new people in my life. That same old barrier I put up to protect myself. I didn’t let anyone close enough to be able to hurt me. My father had left, as though I was as insubstantial as air. As a child, I’d struggled to come to terms with it. He’d been there every single day, and then he wasn’t. So what were we to him? A stopgap until something he determined as better came along? With the Aunt Margot feud, and subsequent alienation of the family, it felt as though people abandoned us like we were yesterday’s newspaper. Could I fall into friendships with these girls, and then leave? Maybe it was time for me to stop worrying about anything other than living in the moment. I was missing out on so much, standing on the edge of life, waiting for something that might never happen.

The Border reivers were aggressive, ruthless, violent people, notoriously quick on the draw, ready and occasionally eager to kill in action, when life or property or honour were at stake. They were a brave people, and risked their lives readily enough; when they had to die, they appear to have done so without undue dramatics or bogus defiance which would have been wasted anyway. They lived in a society where deadly family feud was common, and when they were engaged in feud they killed frequently and brutally, as we shall see. When they were not engaged in feud, they certainly killed less readily. Their ordinary reiving did not, perhaps, entail quite as much bloodshed as one might expect in the violent circumstances. Bishop Leslie and Scott explain this by pointing out that the Borderers regarded reiving as legitimate (which is true), but that they held murder to be a crime, and consequently were reluctant to commit it—except in the heat of action or when covered by the virtual absolution of deadly feud. It is rather like saying that a heavy drinker, in his sober moments, is an abstemious man.

the family feuds of the nobles were beyond control. Revenge was regarded rather as an act of private justice than as a crime. The remotest members of a clan were bound by the obligations of the vendetta, which had its special home in Italy. Its history in the Middle Ages is largely one of family feuds that turned into wars. These ended either by the extermination of one party or by the intervention of the emperor or the church, imposing reconciliation and indemnities.

Please go home with me and stay forever. I will hide you in my closet and take you out at night, and I promise to be gentle," he said between kisses.

You, Declan, are sexy as hell." He leaned in and kissed the top of her breasts. "And how sexy is that?" "Think of the heat down there in hell. You are seven times hotter than that.

In Dickinson terms, he epitomised the absurd ‘Somebody’, the anti-type to a ‘Nobody’ like the poet herself. Ironic that a creature so incapable of effacement should contrive to link his name to hers. Above all, Montague was bent on the glory of the grand public gesture. He wanted the kudos he was bound to have as sole donor of a collection remarkable for the fact that a poet of her stature had been unpublished in her lifetime. Her manuscripts had never been seen; her reclusive life tantalised the public; and many mysteries waited to be uncovered.

This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.

Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson’s legacy have been the dustheaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses.

The only secret people keep is ‘Immortality’, Dickinson once said. Immortality is the mystery at the core of her story.

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen's duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide.

Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily’s ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin

she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes—a favourite source of paper—on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers),

Already there was a contest, always kept under the surface, between the father and son. It concerned ways of doing things, decisions to be made. As yet, the son always surrendered. It is like that in a family, little isolated groups formed within the larger group, jealousies, concealed hatreds, silent battles secretly going on…

This is a common form of exchange when Mississippians meet for the first time. They want to know about each other’s ancestors, and which families they married into. If kinship ties can be established, so much the better. If there was a feud in the past, it could get awkward.

The need for attachment never lessens. Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.

The world had become Newton’s family, with a few notable exceptions. Having laid Robert Hooke to rest, literally, Newton had become involved in an all-out feud with a German philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had claimed credit for discovering the calculus. (See “Between a Rock and a Hard Life.”)

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties.

He nodded. A police or French siren went off. The French have a different siren than we do—more insistent, horrible, like the love child of a cheap car alarm and the wrong-answer buzzer on Family Feud. We let it shatter our silence and waited for it to fade away. I

As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city’s dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people is family. The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.

The Wars of the Roses…were one of the most confused and confusing chapters of English history; in which each usurper, as soon as he had gained the throne, found himself having to defend it against the next; in which so many members of the feuding families were closely inter-related; in which a man could be both hero and villain at one and the same time… One by one, the royal houses of England destroyed each other and themselves.

Although family dinners can be a good way for people to connect, they can also be the reason for a great deal of heartburn.

Mabel Todd is a plausible propagandist for her story because she sticks close to the truth, deviating, often, with one word. Apart from ‘definitely’ in this case, it’s the apparently insignificant word ‘then’ that shifts the sequence in favour of innocent passivity. Look like the innocent flower. To us in the future, the manoeuvre can look like the merest slip of memory. Only it’s there too often to be a slip. It’s an almost automatic untruthfulness, the insignificant cog driving the wheel of a plot Mabel sets in motion.

Lavinia turned against Susan, the primacy of whose tie with Emily was ever more evident as letters came to light. Why had Emily confided in Sue and concealed this hoard from the sister who had protected her so faithfully?

week later, a tantalising scene ensued: Fanny Norcross holding Dickinson’s letters in front of Todd, cutting out the confidences as she reads.

Lavinia insisted that Todd’s preface should include a statement that Emily Dickinson’s sister had collected the letters. Todd, unaccustomed to submit on demand, persuaded Roberts Brothers to reprint the letters with a different version of that sentence. It was to say that Emily Dickinson’s sister had asked Mabel Loomis Todd to collect her letters, implying Todd alone had done the job.

Mabel Todd took the offensive with her expanded edition of the Dickinson letters. Her preface presented it as the first book ever issued about Emily Dickinson, prepared at the requests of the poet’s brother and sister: Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson ‘and I’ collected letters ‘which they entrusted to me’ to edit and publish. At a stroke, this authorised editor displaced an unauthorised niece.

On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson’s punctuation may be to the way we read her.

Mr Niles reaffirmed his adverse opinion. He had always thought it ‘unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems. They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties & are generally devoid of the true poetical qualities.

The volume was a huge success, to the surprise of Houghton Mifflin who had rejected the poems, Niles who had grudgingly published them and the still rather offhand Austin. Five hundred copies of Poems were sold on the day of publication; the volume was reprinted eleven times in the first year; and the total sale, astonishing for a poet publishing a first collection, was almost eleven thousand copies.

Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945.

Given the array of correspondents—Abiah Root, Mrs Holland, Sam Bowles, Maria Whitney, Mabel Todd herself and many minor figures—a distorting omission is the correspondence with Susan. Nowhere is she mentioned. It’s a common temptation to editorial power to contrive a bias, sometimes in covert ways. Here the agenda is all too plain.

Norcross was distant and scrupulous: she offered to read aloud from the extracts and letters she had copied so that Todd could check the proofs for the forthcoming volumes, but no eyes, she insists, will ever fall on the censored content. The following letter makes it plain that a huge batch of Dickinson’s letters—the originals—are to disappear: Concord [Massachusetts] Aug. 1, 1894 My dear Mrs. Todd, … I cannot send the letters, not because I fear they will be lost, but because my sister and I are not willing that any one even Vinnie should have the free reading of them; many of them have whole sentences which were intended for no eyes but ours, and on our own account as well as Emily’s no one else will ever read them. This we consider our right, and we must insist upon it.

she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had ‘in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself’. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie’s version of her aunt’s life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous?

The first volume of Dickinson poems, bound in white leather and published on 12 November 1890, was handled in just the way that had put the poet off publication during her lifetime: the editors had tampered with the inventive punctuation and off-rhymes of the volcano speaking through ‘buckled lips’. Words were changed ‘to make them smoother’ (as Mabel Todd put it) and dashes eliminated. There were trivialising titles like ‘With a Flower’, ‘Playmates’ and ‘Troubled about many things’.

Another intense relationship was kept under wraps. No letters to Judge Lord were published for half a century, and by that time the renunciatory legend was so firmly established that Emily’s delight in the Judge’s visits and her candour about desire have been underplayed.

Lavinia resented the way Todd underplayed Lavinia’s role in favour of her own. Money was not the main issue, nor even the prestige of association with strangely brilliant letters unlike any other. The crux was Mabel Todd’s advance, a step further on to Dickinson territory: her first step had won Susan; her second step had won Ned; her third, Austin, with Lavinia’s assent; a fourth step had failed to win over the poet herself, but Emily’s death had opened the way for a takeover of her papers.

In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called ‘the myth’; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her ‘mystery’. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as ‘whimsical’, ‘wayward’, ‘uneven’ and ‘exasperating’. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself:

This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did encounter words like blades but, as mouthpiece for the family, never mentions this, any more than Jane Austen’s family saw fit to mention her sarcasms. Nineteenth-century families project an image of an authoress as retiring lady whose gift shades into an uneventful life. Nothing could be said of sickness, love, adultery or the rising fire of the feud.

strange scene takes place in the middle of 1891, when the biographical project has barely begun. Mabel, with Austin’s collusion, begins to tamper * with the overwhelming evidence of Emily’s bond with Susan. A booklet containing ‘One sister have I in the house / And one a hedge away’ is taken apart so as to remove the poem. Emily’s sewing holes are cut to disguise the poem’s place in the booklet, but though the page is thus mutilated, and torn in two places, it’s not destroyed for the sake of another poem on the verso. Using black ink the mutilator scores out all the lines and, most heavily, the climax ‘Sue—forevermore!

Two formidable difficulties at once presented themselves: half the correspondence—the letters Dickinson received—had been destroyed and her own letters are undated after 1855.

two versions of the contract with Roberts Brothers, arranged by E. D. Hardy who, that year, succeeded Mr Niles. One is the draft, sharing copyright and royalties with Todd. The other is the final version, in which Lavinia Dickinson retains exclusive copyright. The existence of two contracts was to provide ammunition for renewed battle in time to come. Mabel retained her copy of the draft contract which granted what she wanted. Lavinia retained her copy of the final contract which, in effect, deprived Mabel of what she wanted.

reader’s report by Arlo Bates, a poet favoured by the firm, noted Dickinson’s ‘crudity of workmanship’. He foresaw no possibility of making a stir but did concede that this was the real thing, a power near to genius. Had she published—had she learnt the conventions of punctuation and rhyme—‘she would have stood at the head of American singers’.