Relationships and Family

When one has not had a good father one must create one.

When one has not had a good father one must create one.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.

Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life.

There is scarcely any less bother in the running of a family than in that of an entire state. And domestic business is no less importunate for being less important.

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.

Such is the patriot’s boast, where’er we roam,

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

The Stately Homes of England,

And when a lady’s in the case, You know all other things give place.

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared … to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free of them there.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

 

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

[ Of Ronald Reagan :] For seven and a half years I have worked alongside him and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex.

 

All children, except one, grow up.

 

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.