Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940Quotes
I cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BCIn peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCMen are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Nobody, 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, 1815My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810Family! 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, 1886To 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, 1954All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCMy mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897