Paul Auster Quotes

I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.

You can only be a good father in relationship to your childhood.

Truthfully, I'm still Corey Hart, Dad, first.

With sons and fathers, there's an inexplicable connection and imprint that your father leaves on you.

Whether you have an abusive father or the most amazing dad ever, every son is trying to find their way out from under the shadow of their dad.

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

I would say my relationship with my father has had a bigger impact on me than I knew. Even with the things that I love, the things that I am attracted to. A lot of it stems from the things that I've seen in my life as a child.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)

Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe

I seldom remember my father, but I sneeze and rub my nose the way he did. I also love my son with grief and anger, as he did.

It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life--however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied.

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

Acheron kissed her lightly on the cheek. "Rest. We'll be back when he needs you." He watched her climb into bed before he took his nephew down to his room. "Well, it appears to be just the two of us, little one. What say you we get naked, drunk and find us some wenches?" The baby actually smiled up at him as if he understood. Acheron nodded. "So that's it, eh? Barely a month old and you're already lecherous. You are your father's son.

We have a whole generation of men who don't understand how much they mean to their kids.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.

I feel now like a hinge between generations, which is strange. It just happened recently. I think it's because my daughter is so much like me at her age. I feel like I'm reliving my own mother's experience of raising me.

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.