Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

This line is widely attributed to André Gide’s early, symbolist-influenced work *Les Nourritures terrestres* (*Fruits of the Earth*, 1897), a book cast as a series of exhortations urging the reader (and the addressed figure “Nathanaël”) toward openness, travel, sensual experience, and self-liberation. In that setting, Gide attacks the bourgeois ideal of the closed household as a moral and emotional enclosure—an institution that can turn love into ownership and happiness into something hoarded. The outcry reflects Gide’s broader late-19th-century revolt against social conformism and the ways domestic respectability could be used to police desire and individuality.

The exclamation is less a literal hatred of kin than a denunciation of the family-as-fortress: “shut-in homes” and “closed doors” suggest privacy hardened into exclusion, while “jealous possessions of happiness” frames domestic contentment as something guarded and proprietary. Gide contrasts this possessive model with a more expansive ethic—happiness as movement, encounter, and shared vitality rather than a commodity secured behind walls. The line’s force comes from its paradox: the institution meant to shelter can also imprison, and the desire to protect what one loves can curdle into jealousy and control. It is a manifesto against enclosure—moral, social, and emotional.