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, 1954Quotes
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1919My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCMother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919