“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.”

“Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“"Come, come," said Tom's father, "at
your time of life,
There's no longer excuse for thus
playing the rake--
It is time you should think, boy, of
taking a wife."
"Why, so it is father--whose wife
shall I take?"”

“Man is blinded in this life and therefore we may not see our Father, God, as He is. And what time that He of His goodness willeth to shew Himself to man, He sheweth Himself homely, as man. Notwithstanding, I reason, in verity we ought to know and believe that the Father is not man.”

“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.”

“Oh, wonderful. I killed his father. He hates me. He knows how to make bombs. Come on, Wedge, how does this story end?”

“My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!”