Archive

Quotes

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.  

—Gertrude Stein, 1940

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

—Jane Austen, 1815

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

—Tecumseh, 1810

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

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

—André Gide, 1897