Father Quotes - Page 294

My mother would like me to start all interviews by stating that she and my father are perfectly normal. They are proud of me, and as perplexed as anyone by my novels.

Striding tall through Lauren St John's gorgeously written memoir is her father, and chapter after chapter their relationship is untangled and celebrated. Joy and a hunger for life infuse this book -- whether St John is writing about the harrowing years of Rhodesia's civil war, her childhood adventures in the bush, or the breaking apart of her family. Rainbow's End is a most generous and wise book.

My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I began writing The Cold Song in the months following my fathers death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: What now? How to proceed?

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

I have been informed that he has started false allegations regarding myself and the cause of my illness. It angers me to see that my own father would stoop to such a level.

My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.

One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.

My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.

My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.

If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.

I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.

when Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.

I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-" "The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl." He sounds bitter and sad. "If the world will not forgive me," I say softly, "I shall have to learn to forgive myself." He nods in understanding. "And how will you marry? Or do you intend to marry?" I think of Kartik, and tears threaten. "I shall meet someone one day, as Mother found you.

Kartik places a sovereign in the lady's cup, and I know that it's likely all he has. "Why did you do that?" I ask. He kicks a rock on the ground, balancing it nimbly between his feet like a ball. "She needed it." Father says it isn't good to give money to beggers. They'll only spend it unwisely on drink or other pleasures. "She might buy ale with it." He shrugs. "Then she'll have ale. It isn't the pound that matters; it's the hope...I know what it's like to fight for things that others take for granted.

You and I, we must carry on, Gemma. I cannot afford the luxury of love. I must marry well. And now I must look after you. It is my duty." "If you wish to suffer, you do so of your own free will, not on my behalf. Or Father's or Grandmama's or anyone's. You are a fine physician, Thomas. Why is that not enough?" "Because it isn't," he says with a rare candor. "Only this and the hope of nothing more? A quiet respectability with no true greatness or heroism in it, with only my reputation to recommend me. So you see, Gemma, you are not the only one who cannot rule her own life.

Forget your pain. It was what I said when I took Father's hand in the drawing room yesterday, what I repeated again tonight. But I didn't mean this. I must be careful. Yet what bothers me isn't the power of the magic or how, to a person, they've all accepted it as truth. No, what unsettles me the most is how much I want to believe it too.

I don't think for this generation, but for my generation and my father's generation, men had difficulty in accessing emotion and then being able to talk about it.

It is the right to bear arms which is the problem. I think if the Founding Fathers knew what was happening they would be turning in their graves with embarrassment at how that law has been interpreted.

I grew up in a modern business environment and did not experience the kind of prejudice that my mother and grandfather experienced.

I would have to say that my mother's entrepreneurial perspective, and that of her father's, are very evident in my own outlook.

I started playing golf when I was a kid, because across the street from where we lived there was a little nine-hole golf course where my father worked.

My father worked at the Naval Ordnance Lab, and they had a nine-hole course on the property. You paid a quarter.

The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families.