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

"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is."
— Ellen DeGeneres

"The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families."
— Jay McInerney (The Last of the Savages)

"Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. "
— C.S. Lewis

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

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

"One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives."
— Oscar Wilde

"When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway."
— Erma Bombeck

"Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood."
— Goldie Nash

"Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant...The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives."
— Derek Landy

"Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Roster. You know what I'm saying?"
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"I sustain myself with the love of family."
— Maya Angelou

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

"The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can."
— Gloria Mallette

"All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next."
— Douglas Coupland

"I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man."
— Barack Obama

"Friends are God's way of apologizing for your family."
— Wayne W. Dyer (The Power of Intention)

"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me."
— Matt Groening

"Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion."
— Leigh Hunt

"When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911. "
— Erma Bombeck

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
— Katherine Dunn (Geek Love: A Novel)

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."
— Erma Bombeck

"It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people."
— Maya Angelou

"Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it."
— Mary Karr "The Liar's Club"

"We are a noisy and blessed little family (p. 327)."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"I don't know what to do or where to go; All I know is that I have support."
— Tammy Huang

"To Live is to die,To gain is to give,Sleeping is To Dream,Power is War
and Peace is to let Go of everything in the past before your time."
— Sammy Jackson

"Have your Grandchildren first!"
— Stephen King, Tony Hillerman, Brian Keene, Stephen Bowman, Aimee & David Thurlo

"It doesn't matter to me. We're still cousins in our own way. Blood's just something old people talk about to make you feel bad."
— Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle)

"when your life is in danger, you beg for it, but when your goingt to your inlaws you want to die"
— edward S.

"By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. "
— Augustus Y. Napier (The Family Crucible)

"How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is."
— Carole Maso (The Art Lover: A Novel)

"In communities, at work, but particularly in families, people are put together in something like a three-legged race. God means us to cross the finish line together, and all the other people tied together with us play some part in our progress. They are oftentimes to rouse our stubborn sins to the surface, where we can deal with them and overcome them. Bundled together in families, a giant seven or nine or fifteen legged pack, we seem to make very poor progress indeed and fall to the ground in bickering heaps with some regularity. But God has put us together - has appointed each person in your bundle specifically for you, and you for them. And so, 'little children, let us love one another' with might and main, and keep hopping together toward the finish line."
— Frederica Mathewes-Green

"“…Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.”"
— Marilynn Robinson

"I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong."
— Scott Spencer