Relationships and Family

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, meet the expectation.

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being.

I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Love is a reality which is born in the fairy region of romance.

Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning— nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.

Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself.

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself.

as the silent voice of our parents from the country of the dead.

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.