quotations about family
I wanted to go to a place where you were important and people listened to what you had to say. Mothering hadn't done that ... and yet ... wouldn't it be ironic if my turf yielded the most important commodity being grown today? A family? A crop of children, seeded by two people, nourished by love, watered by tears, and in eighteen or twenty years harvested into worthwhile human beings to go through the process again.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
A family needs to work as a team, supporting each other's individual aims and aspirations.
BUZZ ALDRIN
interview, Scholastic, Nov. 17, 1998
The Family is the Country of the heart.
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
The Duties of Man
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Everything Is Illuminated
He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home and broods a nest of sorrows.
JEREMY TAYLOR
Twenty-Seven Sermons
The family indeed is dead, if what we mean by it is the modern family system in which units comprised of male breadwinner and female homemaker, married couples, and their offspring dominate the land. But its ghost, the ideology of the family, survives to haunt the consciousness of all those who refuse to confront it. It is time to perform a social autopsy on the corpse of the modern family system so that we may try to lay its troublesome spirit to rest.
JUDITH STACEY
In the Name of the Family
A family with an old person has a living treasure of gold.
CHINESE PROVERB
Frankly, I'm fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about family values. Our families have values. But our government doesn’t.
BILL CLINTON
speech at Democratic National Convention, July 16, 1992
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
If the family goes, so goes our civilization.
RONALD REAGAN
State of the Union address, Feb. 6, 1985
When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
Two people who know they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
Marriage is to family what legs are to a table.
BETTY JANE WYLIE
Family: An Exploration
Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.
ANDRé MAUROIS
The Art of Living
Thus in modern times the family drifted on to the high seas, and the world of metaphor such a voyage suggests started to fix itself in the vocabulary of social analysis. Had the winds always blown so strongly as now? people would ask. Had the currents always been so powerful, the family so little able to navigate a separate course?
EDWARD SHORTER
The Making of the Modern Family
Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.
HELEN DENDY BOSANQUET
The Family
Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind ... And Gag!
Governments and politicians use the family as an indicator of the health and strength of social life. Politicians fear that any weakening of family life will in some way sap the vitality of national life.... The family is also important to businessmen. It is one of the major purchasing groups of our consumer society.
ADRIAN WILSON
Family
Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Les confidences
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but a the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack