Extracts
On Family
Selected from the Winter 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968
Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house fathers, and a hell for children.
—August Strindberg, 1886
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
—George Carlin, 1997
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977
If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, c. 1960
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It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668
The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.
—Euripides, c. 430 BC
To be a successful father there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1954
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.
—Robert Frost, 1960
Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, c. 1880
Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.
—Chinese aphorism
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1955
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895
Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.
—Jewish proverb
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900
The building up of a family is a manufacture very little above the building a house of cards. Time and accidents are sure to furnish a blast to blow it down.
—George Savile, c. 1695
A good many family trees are shady.
—Robert Elliot Gonzales, 1918
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
—George Eliot, 1859
It is easy to govern a kingdom but difficult to rule one’s family.
—Chinese proverb
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
—Harry S. Truman, 1955
I cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BC
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, 1977
He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1786
We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.
—Marie de Sévigné, 1670
FAMILY
Winter 2012
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