You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.
Strange, my enemies know me best, and my family doesn’t know me at all.
There are secrets in all families.
You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you…
You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.
There were but two families in the world – Have-Much and Have-Little.[translation by John Willis Clark]There are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Haven’ts.[translation by John Ormsby][Dos linages solos hay en el mundo, que son el tener y el no tener.]
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
