Some of my ideas certainly came from my mother's father. She and he had a family argument and didn't see each other for twenty years, though we all lived in the same town. Mother wouldn't let my grandfather in the house. She let me visit him though. He was part Indian and part French, a tiny dark-haired man with an Indian hoked-nose; tight-lipped and stubborn. But he talked to me about the spirits of the fire and the wind, and took me for long walks in a nearby woods, while he told me Indian legends.
Robert ButtsRelated topics
argument came family father fire french house man mother see stubborn take tell town twenty visit while wind years woods nearbyRelated quotes
A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Symons ... remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited-long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms-what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.
Alain de Botton
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.
Norman Borlaug
Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.
Carl Jung
For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
Marcus Aurelius