A Quote by David Starkey
My father, Bob, was a sweet, gentle man who was prone to frustration. I hardly knew him as a child, but that was typical of those days. He got up early, came home late and wanted to be left alone.
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My kids are in school and in all these clubs - chess club, fashion club, you name it. When my dad came home from work, it was late, and when he left, it was early in the morning. On my days off, I'm still taking my kids to school and picking them up. I do what I have to do to keep that relationship.
As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up.
My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.
From a child, I knew I didn't have the face I wanted to have. My mother was a baroness. She was from Berlin; she was a silent movie actress and friends with Marlene Dietrich. So she knew all about film make-up and prosthetics and stuff like that and what they used to do in those days. And she taught me all that as a child.
Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd law; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.
The child in me could not die as it should have died, because according too legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,--now under one disguise, now under another,--like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.
I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers. I’d met mine of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I’d never seen my father scared or cry. I’d never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I’d seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression—one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.
In Jack Dempsey's early days he had a fight contract, which paid him two dollars per fight for the fights he won. He received nothing for the fights he lost. Jack Dempsey said that in his early days he was knocked down a lot of times and he usually was tempted to stay down because he knew that no one would hit him again until he started to get up. But Jack was a hungry fighter and he knew that if he was going to eat, he must get up in order to get the two dollars. He tells of one occasion when he was knocked down 11 times in one fight, and 11 times he got up in order to win the $2.
I'm the son of a pastor and evangelist and I've described many times how my father, when I was a child, was an alcoholic. He was not a Christian. And my father left my mother and left me when I was just three years old. And someone invited him to Clay Road Baptist Church. And he gave his heart to Jesus and it turned him around. And he got on a plane and he flew back to my mother and me.
So when the book came out, my mother stunned us all by leaving my father. I think three months before the book came out, she left my father the day he retired from the Marine Corps. They had a parade and march, and she came home and left.
I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend [Billy Bob Thorton] got married, and I've never heard from him again.
I can't even begin to describe how I miss him. He always supported me in everything I did. He was a very wise man and I realised at an early age I could learn a lot from him. He always gave me the right answer. But above all he was a very easy-going guy and all he wanted was to be my best friend. I'm an only child and so he shared everything with me. Of course he was very young to die and I was very young to lose a father. But there was nothing left unsaid between us.
One day as I came home early, I saw a man jogging naked. I said to the guy, 'Hey, buddy, why are you doing that?' He said, 'Because you came home early.'
The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
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