quotations about family
In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.
MARGE KENNEDY
The Single Parent Family
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
MARIO PUZO
The Family
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Notebook O," The Crack-Up
Whoever is acquainted with the cruel injustice and unjust subordination frequently manifested in the family, whoever sees matters of lasting and supreme importance relative to the beginning and continuance of the family determined by momentary fancy or unreasoning passion, cannot but desire the construction of a social fabric in which reason may rule with perfect justice.
CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING
The Family: An Historical and Social Study
A family in harmony will prosper in everything.
CHINESE PROVERB
What is family? They were the people who claimed you.
SARAH DESSEN
Lock and Key
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
ANDRE GIDE
Fruits of the Earth
The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.
MARIANNE E. NEIFERT
Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide
All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
ERMA BOMBECK
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 1, 1978
A family is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece corresponds to a family member and the strengths he or she possesses. Not everyone is going to share the same strengths. Not everyone is going to be prone to the same weaknesses. However, when all the pieces come together to form a whole, it couldn't be what it is without every one of them.
SARA DIMERMAN
Character Is the Key
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.
JONATHAN RABAN
For Love and Money
A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.
MARIO PUZO
The Godfather
There is an interconnectedness among members that bonds the family, much like mountain climbers who rope themselves together when climbing a mountain, so that if someone should slip or need support, he's held up by the others until he regains his footing.
PHIL McGRAW
Family First
Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind ... And Gag!
Focus on your marriage. Because that's the nucleus of the home, whatever you do to restore its health and strength will naturally restore what's broken among the other relationships. If you have no children yet, this will make a comfortable nest for them to begin life well. If you have children, the changes you make in your marriage will affect the rest of the household more quickly and dramatically than you think.
CHARLES R. SWINDOLL
Marriage: From Surviving to Thriving
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
BERNARD SHAW
preface, Immaturity
Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone.
NEIL KURSHAN
Raising Your Child to Be a Mensch
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede