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Motivation Quote by Earl Wilson

"Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back"

About this Quote

Wilson lands the punchline by taking the most sentimental word in the language and shrinking it to the size of a set of car keys. "Home" is supposed to be hearth and permanence; in his version it’s a waiting room organized around a vehicle’s return. The joke works because it treats modern domestic life as a logistics problem, not a moral one: affection isn’t absent, it’s just been rerouted through schedules, errands, and who gets the wheels.

The specific intent is observational and needling. Wilson isn’t romanticizing the past so much as clocking a cultural shift: the car has become the family’s shared bloodstream. When he says "part of the family waits", he’s sketching a quiet hierarchy of mobility. Someone is empowered to leave; someone is stuck. That split can read as generational (teenagers out, parents anxious), gendered (mid-century assumptions about who drives and who stays), or economic (one car, many obligations). The humor is that the domestic center no longer looks like a dining table; it looks like an empty driveway.

Contextually, it’s a postwar American snapshot: suburban expansion, commuting culture, and the car as both freedom and tether. The line is light on its feet, but the subtext is edged: when movement becomes the household’s organizing principle, togetherness turns conditional. Home isn’t where the heart is; it’s where you wait for transportation to come back and make the next part of life possible.

Quote Details

TopicFamily
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Wilson, Earl. (2026, January 16). Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/home-nowadays-is-a-place-where-part-of-the-family-125942/

Chicago Style
Wilson, Earl. "Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/home-nowadays-is-a-place-where-part-of-the-family-125942/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/home-nowadays-is-a-place-where-part-of-the-family-125942/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Earl Wilson

Earl Wilson (October 2, 1934 - April 23, 2005) was a Athlete from USA.

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