You didn't ask for them, you can't change them, and yet of all the people on earth they're likely to know you best and be the most important to you.

Families are rarely simple and bonds of blood - whether good or bad - always run deep. So it's no wonder some of the great authors and poets from history have pondered it on the page.

Here's a selection of witticisms and wisdom from writers past and present that illuminate something about the conundrums and complexities of family love.

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  • Agatha Christie

    "A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no aw, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path." IMAGE: PA

  • Oscar Wilde (1)

    "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." IMAGE: PA

  • Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

    "This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt." IMAGE: PA

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

    "Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material." IMAGE: PA

  • Frederick Buechner

    "You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you." IMAGE: Wikimediacommons

  • Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages

    "The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families." IMAGE: PA

  • Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty

    "I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family."

  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

    "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." IMAGE: PA

  • Mario Puzo, The Family

    "The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other." IMAGE: PA

  • Marjorie Pay Hinckley

    "Home is where you are loved the most and act the worst." IMAGE: Getty

  • Oscar Wilde (2)

    "Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." IMAGE: PA

  • Mark Twain

    "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." IMAGE: PA

  • Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

    "All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair." IMAGE: PA

  • Peggy O'Mara

    "Be careful how you speak to your children, one it will become their inner voice." IMAGE: Getty

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

    "Men are what their mothers made them." IMAGE: wikimediacommons

  • Rick Riordan

    "My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it." IMAGE: PA

  • Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

    "You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family."

  • W. Somerset Maugham

    "Few misfortunes can befall a boy which brings worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother." IMAGE: PA

  • William Butler Yeats

    "No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love." IMAGE: PA

  • Honore de Balzac

    "The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness." IMAGE: wikimediacommons

  • George Eliot, Adam Bede

    "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it." IMAGE: REX

  • Oscar Wilde (3)

    "After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives." IMAGE: PA