Never bad-mouth your ex-husband to your kids.
Because if you do, then you ruin the moment
when they figure it out all by themselves.CORY KAHANEY,
Never try to fool children.
They expect nothing and therefore see everything.HARVEY KEITEL,
Never praise a sister to a sister,
in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears,
and so preparing the way for you later on.RUDYARD KIPLING,
This advice to suitors comes from the story “False Dawn.” Kipling went on to explain: “Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards.” His point is quite sexist, of course, but there are still many people who believe that female siblings are so competitive that one sister would never pass along a positive thing she heard said about another sister.
Never try to win an argument.
A common destroyer of marriages is seeing the relationship
as a competition rather than a cooperation.JOE KITA,
You Either Know, or You Don’t
Never inform your spouse of your intention to divorce
by having a lawyer send over papers.MEL KRANTZLER
The pioneering divorce counselor added, perhaps unnecessarily: “This is a red-hot poker, likely to incur bitter retaliation.” Krantzler authored numerous books on divorce and marriage. His
Never allow your child to call you by your first name.
He hasn’t known you long enough.FRAN LEBOWITZ,
Never marry unless you can do so into a family
that will enable your children to feel proud of both sides of the house.ROBERT E. LEE,
Never imagine that children who don’t say, or ask, don’t know.ROSAMOND LEHMANN,
The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life
Never put your baby’s length on a birth announcement.
It’s a baby, not a marlin.CAROL LEIFER,
the Terrorists Win
Never change diapers in mid-stream.DON MARQUIS
Marquis is usually described as an American humorist, but at various stages of his life he was a novelist, playwright, newspaper columnist, and cartoonist. He is best remembered for “Archy and Mehitabel,” a cartoon strip about a cockroach and a cat. Archy the cockroach, who was a poet in a previous life, left free-verse poems on Marquis’s typewriter by jumping from key to key. The poems were all typed in lowercase because Archy could not operate the shift key.
Never tell your grandchildren, “When I was your age . . .”DAVID L. MCKENNA,
McKenna also offered a number of other admonitions for those in their senior years:
Never marry but for love.WILLIAM PENN,
Never marry for money.ENGLISH PROVERB
Variations of this proverb show up in many cultures. A Scottish version goes this way: “Never marry for money. Ye’ll borrow it cheaper.”
Never rely on the glory of the morning or the smile of your mother-in-law.JAPANESE PROVERB
Never give a child a sword.LATIN PROVERB
Never quarrel about a baby’s name before the child is born.NORWEGIAN PROVERB
Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry.SPANISH PROVERB
Never marry a man who uses the word “feminist” as a term of abuse.ANITA QUIGLEY,
Never part without loving words to think of during your absence.
It may be that you will not meet again in life.JEAN PAUL RICHTER
Never marry a girl who feels she is not getting
the best man in the world when she gets you.KARISA RIVERA,
Rivera added: “A girl who enters marriage thinking she could have done better will never be satisfied for wondering what it might have been like if . . .”
Never tell her about your sex life—or lack of it.
It’s ugly to see pity in a daughter’s eyes.JOAN RIVERS,
Rivers offered this advice about mother-daughter communication in a 1994 issue of
