Relationships and Family

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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