Fathering Quotes (page 77)
She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam. I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father's sake. But to be honest, I'm not the forgiving type.
Suzanne Collins
He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through...
John Steinbeck
The uncle ignored Gracie's father. 'In any event,' he went on, 'when brewers combine hops with yeast and grain and water, and allow the mixture to ferment -- to rot -- it magically produces an elixir so gassy with blue-collar cheer, so regal with glints of gold, so titillating with potential mischief, so triumphantly refreshing, that it seizes the soul and thrusts it toward that ethereal plateau where, to paraphrase Baudelaire, all human whimsies float and merge.
Tom Robbins
Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Others may decieve you - you decide what's good. You decide alone, but no one is alone. People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes, holding to their own, thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes. Fight for their mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what's right. You decide what's good.
Stephen Sondheim
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.
P. D. James
Low ceiling, stone walls, a dirt floor stamped with paw prints. I never go in without announcing myself. 'Hyaa!' I yell. 'Hyaa. Hyaa!' It's the sound my father makes when entering his toolshed, the cry of cowboys as they round up dogies, and it suggests a certain degree of authority. Snakes, bats, weasels --it's time to head up and move on out.
David Sedaris
So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.
Frank O'Connor
But the vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him. [from Middlemarch, a quote my mother thinks describes the kind of man my father was]
George Eliot