Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related for better or for worse...and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

Living is messy.

This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.

There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.

The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a “growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families.” For

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

It is sometimes hard to be a family.

The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. . . A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar.

A family is a group of people who keep confusing you with someone you were as a kid.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

The family becomes rigid and hard when it excludes others from its meals; those that must be fed provide a natural pretext for the exclusion of others. The hollowness of this pretext is revealed by families which have no children and yet make not the slightest move to share their meal with others. The 'family' of two is man's most contemptible creation.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations.