Dervla Kirwan Quotes

I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, 'Get the hell off my property.'

It seemed like my father and I were always fighting. I know a lot of kids go through that with their families, but it was hard for me.

Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive.

When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something.

It's great if the in-laws themselves put up boundaries. But if they won't; it's up to their grown kids to do it and enforce them.

Nothing is quite so emotional and passionate as what goes on inside of a family. People are driven to distraction by a father or a mother or a husband. Or a child.

My father had kicked me out of his house at the height of an argument over an opinion difference. He had become so enraged. He told me never to come back, and that was all the severance it took.

A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates.

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.

You never argued with my mother. You couldn't win.

Basically, when I hear the words 'family drama,' I run in the opposite direction.

The only way you can write about a happy family in a drama is to make them unhappy.

I bet I would make a really good daughter-in-law.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

Yes, a family is interesting. You can get a lot of drama in the conflicts there. It's like the sea. It seems calm, but inside there is conflict.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

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

I think the father-son dynamic is interesting. I don't have a male friend who hasn't had some kind of conflict with their dad, and I don't have a male friend who hasn't had some kind of conflict with their son.

I get along really well with [my father] now, but I had a terrible time with him in my teenage years. All we did was scream at each other, and when we weren't screaming at each other, we just wouldn't talk to each other.

I bought my mother-in-law a beautiful chair for Christmas, but she won't let me plug it in.

I suppose, mother-in-laws are frightening figures. Especially, more so for mother-in-laws to be.

Nothing like watching your relatives fight, I always say.

They (mothers-in-law) never leave when they say they will. When my mother-in-law visits, the mice throw themselves at the cat, begging to be eaten.

We've got the children so we have to deal with each other because we have to deal with children's problems, you know, and our own problems. But some days it's fine, and then some days we just are at each other's throat.

My mom gets so upset at me when I say stuff in the press about anything political, and it drives me crazy because I say to my mom: 'I can't be on the side of any sort of war and I'm not going to be.'