Regarding family: I come from a family of seven kids. I was the third child, the first daughter, which meant I was the second mother: cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids. As a result, I've never married and I don't have children.






The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
- Erma Bombeck


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


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


Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up - 'cause they're looking for ideas.
- Paula Poundstone


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


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 love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
- P. J. O'Rourke


When you look at Prince Charles, don't you think that someone in the Royal family knew someone in the Royal family?
- Robin Williams


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


If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
- Marian Wright Edelman


Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.
- Michael Levine


You would think that those who are always talking about family values would want to create an environment of permanent relationships for people of the same sex. But they're not advocating family values. They're advocating their values.
- Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco


Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
- Oscar Wilde


Children are the true connoisseurs. What's precious to them has no price - only value.
- Bel Kaufman


There's no way that moving in with your parents is a sign that your life is on track.
- Jerry Seinfeld


Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that allow children to come back home.
- Bill Cosby


Adults are just children who earn money.
- Kenneth Branagh


Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
- Red Buttons


As long as I continue to hear "normal" people telling me I am too childish, I know I'm doing just fine.
- Wayne Dyer


I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
- Mary Karr


When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain


If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'
- Jeff Foxworthy


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


Probably the worst time in a person's life is when they have to kill a family member because they are the devil. But otherwise it's been a pretty good day.
- Emo Philips


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