The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.
In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.
If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.
For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.
The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.
Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.
When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
I live in a beautiful part of the world - western New Hampshire along the Baker River - and my family and I spend a lot of time outdoors.
Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.
