Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Yeah, what they said.

I'm short on inspiration today and even I think my last post was somewhat incoherent, so here are some thoughts that are anything but:

"Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name." - William Wordsworth

"Until you have a son of your own . . . you will never know the joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to be." - Kent Nerborn, Letters to My Son

"One father is more than a hundred Schoolmasters." - George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

"Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. " - Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice." - Anon.

"Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it." - Clarence Budington Kelland

"Noble fathers have noble children." - Euripides.

"What's all this fuss about fathers being present at the birth of their children? The way events are shaping, they'll be lucky to be present at the conception." - George H. Davies.

"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me." - Jim Valvano

"Be kind to thy father, for when thou were young, who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, and joined in thy innocent glee." - Margaret Courtney

"Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents." - Margaret Mead. I include this one because Mead was the anthropologist of whom the Samoans made a complete fool. A classic example of the ascendancy of publicity over competence (here's another). I've never been able to take anything she has said seriously, this quote among them.

"In peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons." - Croesus. Aye, and let us not forget that a divorce is often called a war.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am with you , My wife is using access to the kids as a weapon in our war. (at this point, I am out of the house but get to see the kids very seldom) We await the judge, meanwhile my own father urges me NOT to seek the custody, because he says 1) I will lose and 2) the ugliness I will bring in that pursuit, will just piss her off and then I will have even less access afterwards.