sons Quotes

“He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent.”

“Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

‘Well done!’ James had steered them like a born sailor.”

“A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody”

“I wasn’t a stand-in for Dad. Nobody could be that. When the IED got him in Afghanistan, he became an instant saint in Springfield. I wasn’t him. I’d never be him. But I was still supposed to try. That was my role: the dutiful son.”

“Thebes is not wont to breed unrighteous sons.”

“He talked about how happy he was to be a father, and how much he looked forward to ending his operator career and raising his newborn son, Kai.”

“Chacko was Mammachi’s only son. Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.”

“A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning...A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest”

“A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.”

“Reb Saunders sat back slowly in his chair. And from his lips came a soft, tremulous sigh. He was silent for a moment, his eyes wide, dark, brooding, gazing upon his son. He nodded his head once, as if in final acknowledgment of his tortured victory.”

“[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”

“Then he spoke his son’s name.”

“You have become a small giant since the day Danny’s ball struck your eye. You do not see it. But I see it. And it is a beautiful thing to see.”

“Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his arms. His hand fell on the boy’s head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips, and began to cry.”

“My son is my most precious possession. I have nothing in the world compared to my son. I must know what he is reading.”

“Forgive me…for everything…I have done…A─ a wiser father…may have done differently. I am not…wise.”

“I have no choice,” he said again. “It’s like a dynasty. If the son doesn’t take the father’s place, the dynasty falls apart. The people expect me to be their rabbi. My family has been their rabbi for six generations now.”

“And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me.”

“There are better ways to teach a child compassion.”

“Someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.”

″‘See what a fine fisherman is my son! He will be a chief one of these days.’ Only Tavana Nui would be silent. His son had not gone.”

“I know I’m just a trouble and a burden to you.”

“I’ve enjoyed imagining you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it… it’s the paternal instinct, Amory.”

“She’d been taking care of his material needs for a good year and a half, and his emotional ones, to the extent he wanted them taken care of, for almost as long. ‘I love him as if I birthed him,’ she said.”

“The son went to his mother. He picked her up and rocked her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”

“I learned to love my son without wanting to possess him and I learned how to teach him to teach himself.”

“Sometimes his mother felt like she was in a zoo!”

“If all the lights in her son’s house were out, she opened his bedroom window, crawled across the floor, and looked up over the side of his bed. If that great big man was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”