Ross MacDonald Quotes

Family, like arsenic, works best in small doses...unless you prefer to die.

Families can be the most detrimental things to have in your life. They are sometimes the most poisonous relationships that people have. Sometimes family is the thing that keeps you from ever achieving what you want to achieve, and yet people hold it and hold it and grab it and try to fix it and twist it and turn it.

A family is but too often a commonwealth of malignants.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

Yes, but I - you know, it's been such a long time, I'm sure that I've got cousins and uncles that I've never met before, you know, that I've left behind.

I like my parents but they are just not good parents. They are nice enough people. I'm not interested in hurting their feelings.

Everyone has hiccups in their families.

I only saw my father twice a year. If I'd seen him all the time I'd probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.

There's actually 14 in our family, but we disowned the others.

My father was absolutely no good.

Me and my dad are kind of distant since my mom and him separated.

I'd say that if you had a strained relationship with your mom, for whatever reason, the best thing to do is be open with each other, talk it over, try and work it out somehow as opposed to just putting a wall up and pushing them away.

My parents' marriage was very rocky. They were always arguing. When they split up when I was in my 20s, my brother and I were both delighted because we knew they weren't good for each other.

That case with my two sisters? That was a disaster. It was. They're really fine people. When my family and my two sisters' families - their children - grew up and so on, it just wasn't the same. But we took care of them very nicely.

I come from a big family of brothers and sisters and family dramas and honor and dishonor.

The best TV is always about family, whether it's 'All in the Family,' or 'The Sopranos' or 'The Flintstones.'

I can't have my family in my life because they are abusive, and I don't have control over that. There is an abusive culture in my family, and I have to turn away from it.

If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Family romances are the only ones that never turn out happily.

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.

I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen months-I don't like to interrupt her.

Distance is a great promoter of admiration.

Weddings are never about the bride and groom, weddings are public platforms for dysfunctional families.