“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For as long as I could recall, my mother had simply called me ‘Son,’ and, since her name was Asta, ‘Asta’s son’ became my common name. In a world in which one lived by the light of a father’s name and rank, that meant—since I had no father—I existed in a shadow.”
He’s never named one of his paintings before. To make matters even stranger, he has insisted his son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter Jess go on a vacation to the place he lived growing up. The family drives for hours and moves into a small cottage by a river that starts up beyond them and eventually flows down into the ocean. Jess, an excellent swimmer who craves time in the water, loves the location and the river.
“When his cart was full, he waved good-bye to his wife, his daughter, and his son and he walked at his ox’s head for ten days over hills, through valleys, by streams past farms and villages until he came to Portsmouth and Portsmouth Market.”
“his daughter took her needle and began stitching and his son took is Barlow knife and started whittling and they cooked dinner in their new kettle and afterwards everyone ate a winter peppermint candy and that night the ox-cart man sat in front of his fire stitching new harness for the young ox in the barn”
“and he carved a new yoke and sawed planks for a new cart and split shingles all winter
While his wife made flax into linen all winter, and his daughter embroidered linen all winter, and his son carved Indian brooms from birch all winter, and everybody made candles.”
“Meggie’s smile wavered only slightly. She looked out across the vast lawn at Callum and Sephy. Her son and her employer’s daughter. There were good friends playing together. Real good friends. No barriers. No boundaries. Not yet anyway. It was a typical early summer’s day, light and bright and, in the Hadley household anyway, not a cloud in their sky.”
Alexander Ashbrook, a gifted young aristocrat, is unaware that he even has a son, much less that his child has fallen into -and then been rescued from- the clutches of Otis Gardiner.
“Grocer Cat bought a new dress for Mommy. She earned it by taking such good care of the house. He also bought a present for his son, Huckle. Huckle was a very good helper today.”