“His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech.”

—  John Aubrey , book Brief Lives

"William Shakespeare"
Brief Lives

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercise…" by John Aubrey?
John Aubrey photo
John Aubrey 20
English writer and antiquarian 1626–1697

Related quotes

Halldór Laxness photo

“Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

William Faulkner photo

“She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? … Because to the child, he was not created by his mother's and his father's passion or capacity for it. He couldn't have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl. … and if a boy or a girl really is his father's and her mother's father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother's mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Charles Mallinson in Ch. 19; Charles Mallinson's mother, Maggie, and his uncle, Gavin Stevens, besides being their parents' only children, are twins.
The Town (1957)

Cormac McCarthy photo

“He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Robert Frost photo

“He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.””

Robert Frost Mending Wall

Source: 1910s, Mending Wall (1914)

Samuel Johnson photo

“If the man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
'Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786), p. 67

“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Seven, Part VII

L. Frank Baum photo

“His father thought he had a wond'rous wise look when he was born, and so he named him Solomon, thinking that if indeed he turned out to be wise the name would fit him nicely, whereas, should he be mistaken, and the boy grow up stupid, his name could be easily changed to Simon.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Wond'rous Wise Man", in Mother Goose in Prose (1897)
Short stories

“I think what he went through as a child was very heavy. He never got over his mother leaving his father, and following her mother to Florida, to an area that was very different, and losing his father. When he was seven years old, this was a very sensitive boy, who was wide-eyed and trusting, and not knowing how to protect himself at all.”

Sandra Seacat (1936) American acting teacher and actress

As heard in the "Mickey Rourke" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_KOo2uaH3E installment of The Dark Side of Fame with Piers Morgan, broadcast October 6, 2008.

“Communists sentenced my father's father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his "trial" he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it.”

Peter W. Schramm (1946–2015) American academic

"Born American, But in the Wrong Place" (2006)

Related topics