Relationships and Family

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers / If I belittle dogs and mothers.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

To find oneself jilted is a blow to one’s pride. One must do one’s best to forget it and if one doesn’t succeed, at least one must pretend to.

All the critics in the world may say it’s good but a man’s own mother will know.

Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

If you and your child were going to be lulled tomorrow/would you not give him to eat today?

Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing / A potent spell. All women alike / Fight fiercely for a child.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.

If there’s delight in love, 'tis when I see / That heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year- old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

Jealousy’s a proof of love, / But ’tis a weak and unavailing medicine; / It puts out the disease and makes it show, / But has no power to cure.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

O, if thou car'st not whom I love / Alas, thou lov’st not me.

He injures a fair lady that beholds her not.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?