Family Relationships:

The following quotes illustrate the topic's ambiguity.  Use these to establish the scope of your topic--to begin to specify the subtopics that verbalize various differing opinions on the same issue--to begin to develop a  guide to your reading.

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."    George Santayana

"A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold."    Ogden Nash

"The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have."    Ring Lardner

"He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow;  but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too."    Benjamin Franklin

"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

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

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

"Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt."    Benjamin Franklin

"Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires."    Marcelene Cox

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."    Cicero

"Children are one-third of our population and all of our future."    Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

"There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep."    Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We can't form our children on our own concepts;  we must take them and love them as God gives them to us."    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, - from Hermann und Dorothea

    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life's
    longing for itself...
    You may house their bodies but not their souls,
    for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
    which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.                       Kahlil Gilbran, from The Prophet

"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children."    Clarence Darrow

"How many hopes and fears, how many ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect the parent with the child!"    Samuel Griswold Goodrich

   Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
   And that's what parents were created for.     Ogden Nash

"The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears."    Francis Bacon

"There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you."    Peter De Vries

"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."    Theodore M. Hesburgh