Somber, sarcastic, sentimental; frank, funny, furious; petty, problematic, or profound – here’s the best of what I found on family for #AUTHORity August.   I am careful to include at least as many quotations from women as men, as this is often a balance that is missing from quotation collections, but other than that, and starting out with a particular favorite, these are in no particular order. I did, however, take a perverse pleasure in putting Reinhold Niebuhr next to Erma Bombeck.

1.

There’s no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that’s lived in

But not looked at, love within the light of which

All else is seen, the love within which

All other love finds speech.

This love is silent. —T.S. Eliot

2.

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

3.

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.—Reinhold Niebuhr

4.

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

5.

I decided very early to love my family, and to see in each of its members something rare and good as well as the miserable and painful things that were obvious. I do not think that in writing of them I ever lied. I merely chose to notice in them the things I cherished and preferred, and to refer to the things I didn’t cherish with humor and charity. —William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills

6.

I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.—Marie Curie

7.

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.—Lao Tzu

8.

The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small. ― Mother Teresa

9.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

His eyes went again to the crucifix above his head, reflected in the mirror. The strained arms, the arched spine. All that effort to open the gates of heaven for us and we (he thought) probably spend our first hours among the heavenly hosts settling old scores with relatives. ― Alice McDermott, After This

13.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.― Robert Lee Frost

14.

I missed my mother’s father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed things for all of us if he had stayed home the day he was supposed to die in his car. How his decision to go out for something small, something like coffee or orange juice which everyone could have done without, had changed things for all of us. —Ann Patchett

15.

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

16.

Do not expect too much from your child and she will grow in your love… But if you push her too much, you will push her away. A child is not yours to own but to raise. She may not be what you will have her to be, but she will be what she has to be. Remember what they say, that ‘Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish. —Jane Yolen, Sister Light, Sister Dark

17.

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

18.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar.
Each child in this family has the same space connecting us.
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

19.

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change ― Thích Nhất Hạnh

20.

Your ancestors are rooting for you. —Eleanor Brownn

21.

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. ― Frederick Buechner

22.

You don’t pay back your parents. You can’t. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It’s a sort of entailment. Or if you don’t have children of the body, it’s left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It’s the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren’t bankrupted – but rather, vastly enriched.  —Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

23.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings ― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

24.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to do it rightly is an art like any other. — Freya Stark

25.

If a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will, there’s nobody like a relative to do the business. ― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

26.

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for— its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.—Florence Nightengale, Cassandra

27.

There was once a king, and he had a queen; and he was the manliest of his gender, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more. ― Charles Dickens

28.

She had been to her Great-Aunt Willoughby’s before, and she knew exactly what to expect. She would be asked about her lessons, and how many marks she had, and whether she had been a good girl. I can’t think why grownup people don’t see how impertinent these questions are. Suppose you were to answer:

“I’m the top of my class, auntie, thank you, and I am very good. And now let us have a little talk about you, aunt, dear. How much money have you got, and have you been scolding the servants again, or have you tried to be good and patient, as a properly brought up aunt should be, eh, dear?”

Try this method with one of your aunts next time she begins asking you questions, and write and tell me what she says. ― E. Nesbit

29.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don’t hear his whisper in your blood. ― Salman Rushdie, East, West

30.

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, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook

31.

Home is where they want you to stay longer. ― Stephen King

32.

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn’t know this, or else he was ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more.

We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.

― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

33.

(When asked “Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?”) I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: “What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!” She told me to fix the misunderstanding immediately, so that’s why I’m writing this reply now. Please stop causing problems in my household. Thank you. ― Haruki Murakami

34.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves? —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

35.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three. ― Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

36.

Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at risk. The soulskin vanishes when we are not paying attention to what we are really doing and particularly the cost to us.

We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic, or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied – about self, family, community, culture, world – and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an ending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soul skin as there are women in the world.

The only way to hold on to this sensual soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

37.

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except yours isn’t interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don’t get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee. ― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

38.

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

39.

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere. ― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

40.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.—George Eliot, Adam Bede

41.

Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it’s unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”) ― A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories

42.

I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.—Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

43.

I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude — a feeling which increases with the years. ― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

44.

Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish. —Bell Hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

45.

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever . . . the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat. ― E.B. White

46.

The lamp sizzled as it burned. It made everything seem close and safe, a little family circle they all knew and trusted. Outside this circle lay everything that was strange and frightening, and the darkness seemed to reach higher and higher and further and further away, right to the end of the world.  —Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea

47.

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. ‘Yum!’ he’d say, and ‘Charcoal! Good for you!’ and ‘Burnt toast! My favorite!’ and he’d eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and, for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie, it was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into dry sand. ― Neil Gaiman

48.

Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate;—and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands. — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

49.

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

50.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. —Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

51.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn’t even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality. ― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

52.

When I wrote ‘We Were The Mulvaneys,’ I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.—Joyce Carol Oates

53.

Even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous. ― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

54.

my mother
is pure radiance.

she is the sun
i can touch
and kiss

and hold
without
getting burnt.
― Sanober Khan

55.

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

56.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. —Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club

57.

…we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea. ― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

58.

When we’re dealing with the people in our family – no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs – we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.—Anne Lamott

59.

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pillow. ― Francisco X. Alarcón

Which quotations did you like best? If you have a favorite author’s quotation on family that I’ve not included here, feel free to add it in the comments.