Families come in all kinds, none of them perfect. Family life has been a touchstone for writers and thinkers throughout the ages, a source of ambivalence, psychosis, and love. Here are our favorite musings on parents and children.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
—George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
—Dorothy Parker
No man has ever lived that had enough of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
—William Butler Yeats, “Vacillation”
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened, and maintained.
—Winston Churchill
Listen, I can be President of the United States—or—I can attend to Alice.
—Theodore Roosevelt, as quoted in Ann Hulbert, Raising America
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
—Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
