The mother of a family should look upon her housekeeping and the planning of meals as a scientific occupation.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

I have to be on such a strict diet constantly.

My mother, my grandmother, my uncles would play Ethiopian artists like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke all the time in the house.

Oh, my mama was awesome. Very strict, overreligious, loved the Lord, loved rules. But she had to be that way because of where we were growing up, the neighborhood I was from.

My biggest competitor was my mum. I used to try to beat her at Chinese chequers, chess, carrom, volleyball, badminton, football, wrestling.

A family looks for ways to support and inspire one another.

My work and my family are very important to me.

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

Being the only man in the household with my mom definitely helped me grow up fast.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

When I’m around the kids I feel like I act the most grown-up just because you’re supposed to. And I say things, like every other day, that remind me of my own parents.

If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I’d hear a loud ‚A-hem!‘ from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.

I can’t stress to you enough how much I can relate to teens being cyberbullied. Something that helps me is looking at old videos of me and my friends from middle school, or videos of my family. I love watching funny videos of my favorite people – it really cheers me up.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‚Mad Men‘ episode.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Too many people treat parenting like it’s the 20th item on their to-do list.

I imagine I will spend my days traveling from country to country to visit our children, who I expect will live around the world.

Maria is the best reason to come home.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

To bring a healthy child into this world, raise them right and watch them grow is the biggest miracle there is.

My mom is very religious – Catholic – and from a young age they brought me to the church.

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.

My brother Bob doesn’t want to be in government – he promised Dad he’d go straight.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.

That’s one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don’t have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.

My mother taught children to love to dance.

There’s no political point worth my son’s life.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

I remember when my mother, Shyamala Harris, bought our first home. I was thirteen. She was so proud, and my sister and I were so excited. Millions of Americans know that feeling of walking through the front door of their own home for the first time – the feeling of reaching for opportunity and finding it.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

Rose Adams is a wonderful Christian woman who cared for my mother, Morrow Coffey Graham, in her last years of life.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.