Archive

Quotes

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

—Philip Roth, 1969

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

—Gertrude Stein, 1940

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

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

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

—Herodotus, 440 BC

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

—Albert Camus, 1942

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

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

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

—Susan Sontag, 1977
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