Family

[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.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

The man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to he a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

The difference between outlaws and in-laws is that outlaws don't promise to pay it back.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

 

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.

 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus.

 

The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent.

 

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Dieu créa l’homme, et ne le trouvant pas assez seul, il lui donne une compagne pour lui faire mieux sentir sa solitude .

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

Blood's not thicker than money.

The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity.

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

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

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

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

A child is the root of the heart.

He that has no fools, knaves nor beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

Friends are relatives you make for yourself.