Family Reality Quotes

There's no perfection in family life, and certainly we aren't perfect, but we're probably about as close as we can be.

There's an image that my mother saved my father in 1968 and everything was a bed of roses after that. And that just wasn't true. There were as many struggles in the 1980s and the 1990s as there were in the 1960s.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

Younger kids, they understand that things aren't so perfect with their father or with their mother.

Our life may look glamorous, but we scream at the kids, and I have to tell Jamie to tidy up if we have guests coming over.

I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.

People talk about dysfunctional families; I've never seen any other kind.

When you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that's not the healthiest thing at that early an age.

My family was perfect.

I don't have a perfect meal on the table most nights. Any night!

I don't know that anyone comes from a truly functional family.

I knew that I always wanted a family, but I can honestly say that it's nothing like I imagined it would be.

The idea that there is a family somewhere who functions is an odd concept.

I am a single mother - that is the reality.

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.

I feel like plenty of people have normal-seeming families that, as they're growing up, feel awful. I'd rather have one that looks weird from the outside but felt really normal.