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

"It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations." - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

"The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like class feeling, patriotism, save-your-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom." - Thomas Hardy

"There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson." - Victor Hugo

"A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all." - Washington Irving

"If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!" - Rudyard Kipling

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason

"How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted." - Walter Scott

"If parents would only realise how they bore their children!" - George Bernard Shaw

"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 FROST, quoted in Vogue

"A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?" - ROSE MACAULAY, The World My Wilderness

"One would be in less dange
From the wiles of the stranger
If one's own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with."
- OGDEN NASH, Family Court

"All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina