~ Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family:
Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
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~ As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.
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Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~
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No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. ~
~ Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.
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~ Families are like fudge... mostly sweet with a few nuts. ~
~ Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space. ~
~ A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold. ~
~ 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.
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~ When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses. ~
~ To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there. ~
~ 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.
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