Relationships and Family

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

Blood's thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble / Best to seek out a relative’s open arms.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’ belief in phrenology seems now to us.

Someday, before we all die, perhaps I shall get from home a letter in which all the news will be pleasant. 1 never have thus far.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Everything disturbs an absent lover.

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; / And every little absence is an age.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

Those who are absent, by its means become present; it [mail] is the consolation of life.

’Tis sweet to think, that, where’er we rove, / We are sure to find something blissful and dear, / And that, when we re far from the lips we love, / We’ve but to make love to the lips we are near.

When you are in Rome you long to be in the country, and when you are in the country you praise the distant town to the skies.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

How great love is, presence best trial makes, / But absence tries how long this love will be.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Love all love of other sights controls, and makes one little room an everywhere.

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in life.

Your travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.

I thought I told you to wait in the car.