Family Matters

Sunday, March 4, 2018 – Family Matters

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. ~ Kendall Hailey

Family is just accident. They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are. ~ Marsha Norman

Friends are God’s apology for relations. ~ Hugh Kingsmill

A family is a bunch of people who keep confusing you with someone you were as a kid. ~Robert Brault

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. ~ George Burns

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops. ~ Cary Grant

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. ~ Shirley Abbott

If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. ~ Nancy Mitford

There is no cure for laziness, but a large family helps. ~ Herbert Prochnov

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God? ~ Stephen Colbert

Dictators, unlike democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown. ~ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

What people don’t understand is joining a gang ain’t bad, it’s cool, it’s fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it’s cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family’s in the gang. We’re not just killing people every night; we’re just hanging out, having a good time. ~ Snoop Dogg

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people – no mere father and mother – as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order, and the right of peaceful protest. ~ Barack Obama

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend. ~ Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described – and will be, after our deaths – by each of the family members who believe they know us. ~ Gloria Steinem

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches. ~ Jim Carrey

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. ~ George Bernard Shaw

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. ~ George Bernard Shaw

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations. ~ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family. ~ Jonathan Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. ~ Mary Karr

A happy family is but an earlier heaven. ~ George Bernard Shaw

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. ~ Khalil Gibran

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. ~ Khalil Gibran

The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going. ~ George Carlin

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang – a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness – based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps, that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage. ~ Erma Bombeck

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle. ~ J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Writers will happen in the best of families. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world. ~ Napoléon Bonaparte

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. ~ James Joyce

I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now – look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do. ~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden