Quotes about family and children

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“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

Variant: Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.
Source: Letter to My Daughter

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"The Poet's Story," January 1, 1972 entry
A Small Journal (1974)

“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg (1948); reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O'Brien, 1961), p. 73

“I never waited 27 years, because 27 years ago I was just born. My parents never told me, 'If you don't win Roland Garros we take you to the orphanage.”

Roger Federer (1981) Swiss tennis player

When asked what it was like to wait 27 years to win the French Open. http://198.105.192.83/general/tennis/story?storyId=4760203

“To love is to will the good of the other.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

II-II, q. 26, art. 6
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

“If there is a good will, there is great way.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

“A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.”

Milton Berle (1908–2002) American comedian and actor

“Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Queen

Source: The Other Queen

“I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

“Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

“There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.”

Joni Eareckson Tada (1949) American artist

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Time Magazine (2 June 1986)

“I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there."”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.
As quoted in the New York Times Magazine (11 September 1994).

“Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. ”

Antoine François Prévost (1697–1763) French novelist

“I was not, I lived and loved, I am not.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book A Fish Dinner in Memison

A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941)
Context: The black arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time, when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind: I was not, I lived and loved, I am not.

“My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor