Hitting the nail on the head

Every so often,when I read  a book, something hits the nail on the head so accurately that it's like a lightbulb being switched on. It happened to me last week, when I was reading Anne Tyler's latest novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. 

I love Anne  Tyler's  novels, and have read them all. She writes beautifully, describing the small lives of ordinary people, and her observations are always both acute and accurate. In this novel, I came across a little sentence that rang so many bells: "a mother is only as happy as the least happy of her children". Nothing earth-shattering; not especially brilliant prose; but (for me, at least) so true. For at any given time, I too am only as happy as the least happy of my children.

That's not to say that my family are any less happy than anyone else's (or, come to that,  that I spend all my time fretting about them), but as in all families, there's usually someone with a problem, and sometime it's a big one. And that child, and that problem, are at the forefront of my mind for as long as it takes (not always one child or one problem, either).

Do you have any quotations that have stayed with you, as this one has with me?