Relationships and Family

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

[ Helmer :] First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young woman, it is boldness.

What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

[ Suicide note by a child who killed himself and two siblings :] Done because we are too menny.

Twenty love-sick maidens we, Love-sick all against our will.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Mama, take this badge off of me

How do you know that love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet—it’s gone.

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws.

Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?

Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.