Kinship Quotes: 8 Real Lines on Family, From Austen to Frost, With Their Chapters
Words My Family Quotes Editors
Kinship is an old word for a plain fact: some people are bound to you before you chose anything. Eight English-language writers looked at that fact closely, and this page gives their words exactly as printed, with the chapter or poem each one comes from and a note on when the line is worth using. Five of the eight come from novels, two from poems and one from a book of essays, so each line also has a scene around it that changes what it means.
If you want one line for a card, a toast or a caption, the table near the end matches each quote to an occasion. If you want to know why these eight and not the dozens of "kinship quotes" that circulate without a source, see the last section.
When the family is a country with its own laws
Two of the most useful sentences about kinship are not sentimental at all. They describe a family as a place with customs, pride and a way of judging outsiders.
"The feeblest member of a family—the one who has the least character—is often the merest epitome of the family habits and traditions." — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book I, Chapter VI (1860)
The chapter is called "The Aunts and Uncles Are Coming", and the family is the Dodsons, the relatives of Mrs. Tulliver. Eliot lists their rules: particular ways of curing hams and making cowslip wine, funerals conducted "with peculiar propriety", and the habit of visiting a relative in trouble all at once and telling them "the most disagreeable truths that correct family feeling dictated". The lines about kin are the sharpest: a Dodson who was less like the family than the others was still better than someone who was "no kin". Use this one when you want to say, kindly or not, that a family hands down habits more reliably than it hands down advice.
"Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be." — Jane Austen, Emma, Volume I, Chapter XVIII (1815)
Here Emma is defending Frank Churchill, who has not yet visited his father, by pointing to the demands of the relatives he lives with. Mr. Knightley is not persuaded and answers that there is "one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty". So the sentence is a character's argument, and the novel lets the other side reply. It is still a fair statement of something true: outsiders judge a family from the front door. Say it to a friend who is quick to give an opinion on your relatives.
Born into it: the surprise of relatives
"The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise." — G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Chapter XIV (1905)
The chapter is titled "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family". Chesterton is arguing against those who prefer falling in love as the great adventure: we choose, to some extent, whom we fall in love with, but nobody picks a family. "When we step into the family, by the act of being born," he writes a few lines later, "we do step into a world which is incalculable". It is the funniest description of kinship in this list, and it reads aloud well at a reunion.
"I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!" — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Chapter 47, "Harvest Time" (Part Second, 1869)
Jo says it in the final chapter, after Laurie has thanked her, Amy and his grandfather for all they have done for him, with one hand on his grandfather's head and the other on Amy's, "for the three were never far apart". She goes on to hope that when she has a family of her own "it will be as happy as the three I know and love the best". The exclamation mark is Alcott's, and so is the plainness. It suits a card to a grandparent or a thank-you after a family holiday, where nothing wittier is wanted.
Home as the place that has to take you in
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in." — Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man," North of Boston (1914)
The poem is a conversation between a farmer, Warren, and his wife Mary. She tells him that Silas, the hired man who has left them before, "has come home to die"; Warren repeats the word "Home" with a gentle mockery, and Mary answers that it all depends on what you mean by home, and that Silas is "nothing to us" anyway, no more than a stray hound. Warren then gives his definition, and Mary replies with the other half: "I should have called it / Something you somehow haven't to deserve." Quote both lines together if you can. Warren's version is a rule, Mary's is a kindness, and kinship needs both.
"Home is where one starts from." — T. S. Eliot, "East Coker," part V, Four Quartets (first published 1940)
"East Coker" was printed in the Easter 1940 issue of the New English Weekly and later collected in Four Quartets (1943). The sentence opens the fifth section, and the next lines say that as we grow older "the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living". That is why it fits a family history, a funeral or a page of an album better than a house-warming card: it treats home as an origin, not a comfort.
The family you make
"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?" — George Eliot, Adam Bede, Chapter LIV (1859)
This is the narrator speaking, at the end of the chapter in which Adam and Dinah agree to marry. It is a sentence about the family two people make from scratch, and the final clause, "silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting", is what lifts it from a wedding card to a piece of writing. Use it for an anniversary or a wedding where the couple will read it slowly. Note the sentence is a question; the answer is left to the reader.
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height." — E. M. Forster, Howards End, Chapter 22 (1910)
Margaret Schlegel is thinking about a widower she hopes to help, a man who is "cheerful, reliable, and brave" outside but whose inner life, in Forster's words, has "reverted to chaos". "Only connect" is her whole plan for him: to join the respectable man he shows the world to the feeling man he hides. The novel follows two families and a house, and the phrase has outlived its plot. Taken out of its chapter it works as a motto for any family that has stopped talking: it asks for a conversation, not a conclusion. It belongs on a card to a relative you are trying to reach.
Which line for which moment
| Line (short form) | Source | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| "the merest epitome of the family habits and traditions" | Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, I.6 (1860) | A wry remark about inherited habits |
| "in the interior of a family" | Austen, Emma, I.18 (1815) | Answering outsiders' opinions about your relatives |
| "The supreme adventure is being born" | Chesterton, Heretics, ch. XIV (1905) | A reunion toast, a birth announcement |
| "families are the most beautiful things in all the world" | Alcott, Little Women, ch. 47 (1869) | A thank-you card, a grandparent's birthday |
| "They have to take you in" | Frost, North of Boston (1914) | Welcoming someone back after a long estrangement |
| "Home is where one starts from" | T. S. Eliot, "East Coker" V (1940) | A family history, a memorial, a photo album |
| "joined for life" | Eliot, Adam Bede, ch. LIV (1859) | An anniversary or wedding card |
| "Only connect" | Forster, Howards End, ch. 22 (1910) | A first message after a long silence |
How to use a line without it sounding borrowed
A quotation does the most work when it is followed by one sentence of your own. Pick the line, then add a single true detail about the person: the kitchen table, the road you both know, the name of the house. If the line is from a novel, give the title, because the title is part of the compliment. A short quote in a card, then your name, is better than a long quote with nothing of yours beside it.
For harder family situations, two of these lines do most of the work: Frost's "they have to take you in" gives a reason to open the door, and Forster's "Only connect" gives a reason to write first. If the family relationships are the difficulty, our page on family that is not always blood covers the other side of the question, and the lines on family love for weddings go with the Adam Bede passage.
What we left out, and why
An earlier version of this page carried fifteen lines. We removed the ones we could not trace to a printed page. A line credited to Dickens's David Copperfield ("A loving heart is the truest wisdom") does not appear in the Project Gutenberg text of that novel, and one credited to Washington Irving ("A mother is the truest friend we have") does not appear in his Sketch Book. We also dropped the lines credited to James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Arthur Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee, because we could not confirm their wording against a fetched text for this update, and W. H. Auden's remark on marriage because it concerns marriage, not kinship. For a longer list of attributions that fall apart on inspection, see our check of misattributed family quotes, and for lines that are verified and funny, the Wilde, Chesterton and Austen page.
If you keep one line from this list, keep Frost's pair. "They have to take you in" and "something you somehow haven't to deserve" are the shortest honest description of what a family is for.