You are born into your family ...

You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
 Elizabeth Berg

More phrases

Being self-made is a state of mind, and once you put that mentality to work, your success will come.
 Dave East
A lot of people change for good. Some people just fall off. Just trying to progress in anything, no matter what you're doing, I feel like any progression you make... some people aren't gonna be around you that were around you.
 Dave East
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Don't settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That's your location, it's not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.
Everything in your life, every experience, every relationship is a mirror of the mental pattern that is going on inside of you.

Quotes from the same author

No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.
 Elizabeth Berg
In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.
 Elizabeth Berg
There are people who have never studied writing who are capable of being writers. I know this because I am an example. I was a part-time registered nurse, a wife, and a mother when I began publishing. I'd taken no classes, had no experience, no knowledge of the publishing world, no agent, no contacts ... Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.
 Elizabeth Berg
Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?
 Elizabeth Berg
I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.
 Elizabeth Berg