Father quotes
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"[My father] came over as an immigrant and didn't know any English. He went to work at a sweat shop in Baltimore. He told me later that this guy was coming around, and the guy seemed to be for the workers, so he signed up. It turned out that guy was an IWW organizer . My father didn't regret signing up; he just really didn't know what was going on."
"Ulysses He ... saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid flatong flower."
"I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house? MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer."
"No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them."
"The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones."
"The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men."
"Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid."
"Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably."
"There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen."
"I have no protection at home, or resting place abroad. ... I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth. I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were."
"I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine."
"I remember, as a kid, my dad always told me, "Getting older beats the alternative." Although, now my father actually is the alternative, so I don't know what he would say. He's completely dead."
"My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced."
"My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him."
"My earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death."
"I didn't feel particularly close to my father."
"My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves."
"My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black."
"My father worked at the Naval Ordnance Lab, and they had a nine-hole course on the property. You paid a quarter."
"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."
