Quotes by American Authors - Page 175

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.
Edna Woolman Chase
The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
Richard Hofstadter
Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of civilization.
Daniel Webster
The farmer works the soil The agriculturist works the farmer.
Eugene F. Ware
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if He ever had a chosen people whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.
Thomas Jefferson
Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.
Gary Grant
Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
Jim Bishop
I want you to know how I feel about my Italian heritage so I'd like to say a few words in Italian: Verdi Pavarotti DiMaggio Valentino De Niro Giuliani. . .
Susan Lucci
Home is the place when you have to go there they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
In most states you can get a driver's license when you're sixteen years old which made a lot of sense to me when I was sixteen years old but now seems insane.
Phyllis Diller
We were so poor we had no hot water. But it didn't matter because we had no bathtub to put it in anyway.
Tom Dreesen
Never lend your car to someone you've given birth to.
Erma Bombeck
Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
Red Buttons
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
Fran Lebowitz
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Thomas Jefferson
My father never raised his hand to any one of his children - except in self-defense.
Fred Allen
I read one psychologist's theory that said "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?
Erma Bombeck
Adolescence is when children start trying to bring up their parents.
Richard Armour
The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.
Philip Roth
I don't want to say anything about my kids . . . but I go to PTA meetings under an assumed name!
Robert Orben
I hate housework! You make the beds you do the dishes - and six months later you have to start all over again.
Joan Rivers
Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put "I love Mom" on the license plate.
Erma Bombeck
Have children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.
Rita Rudner
We're supposed to take our problems to a family adviser. Personally I've never met a family adviser. They're all off somewhere listening to dirty stories.
Robert Orben
My father told me marijuana would cause me brain damage - because if he caught me doing it he was going to break my head.
Tom Dreesen
Family is just accident. . . . They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family they just are.
Marsha Norman
I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Mary Karr
The best thing to do is to behave in a manner befitting one's age. If you are sixteen and under try not to go bald.
Woody Allen
The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Sam Levenson
In America there are two classes of travel - first class and with children.
Robert Benchley
Big sisters are the crabgrass in the lawn of life.
Charles Schulz
They are doing away with drive-ins. Now where are the teenagers going to go to not watch a movie?
Bob Thomas
Whenever I'm with my [teenager] I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
Amy Tan
Never brag about your ancestors coming over on the Mayflower the immigration laws weren't as strict in those days.
Lew Lehr
Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that allow children to come back home.
Bill Cosby
Happiness is having a large loving caring close-knit family ... in another city.
George Burns
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
Insanity is hereditary you get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
Cleaning your house while your children are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
Phyllis Diller
There's no way that moving in with your parents is a sign that your life is on track.
Jerry Seinfeld
Each of us has a spark of life inside us and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another.
Kenny Ausubel
Friends will not only live in harmony but in melody.
Henry David Thoreau
You can make more friends in two months by becoming more interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Henry Brooks Adams
Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
Randolph Bourne
Treat your friends as you do your pictures and place them in their best light.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
To be a good friend remember that we are human magnets: that like attracts like and that as we give we get.
Wilfred Peterson
It is not the talking that counts between friends it is the never needing to say what counts.
Shawn Green
A friend is someone who knows all about you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Hubbard
It is not what you give your friend but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of your friendship.
Mary Dixon Thayer
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau
A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
Walter Winchell
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few things are more delightful than grandchildren fighting over your lap.
Doug Larson
If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren I'd have had them first.
Lois Wyse
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Marcelene Cox
There's no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.
Jill Churchill
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell