It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966Quotes
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978By 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, 1955Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
—Mario Puzo, 2001The 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, 1919If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968A 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