Kent Nerburn Quotes

When I started writing 'My Struggle,' my father was still an issue: someone I had in me every day, someone I would dream about - he was still a part of me. He was such a huge figure for me, and now he is just one among many, and that feels like a relief.

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

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

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

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

I had had a father whose shoes I could never fill, against whom I would never measure up; yet, I felt no pressure do so.

I'm estranged from my father and that relationship, as a young man, is incredibly important. It's probably responsible for the man I've become.

It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.

What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.

How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise.

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

Having a strong father, I wanted an older man.

The fact is that you can't have a good relationship with a girl who hasn't settled things with her father.

If you look at many of the women who find themselves with cold, distant, difficult, cruel men, it's because they had cold, distant, difficult, cruel fathers who made them feel that there was no alternative or, at a minimum, who made them choose someone like their father in order to change in this other man what they couldn't change in their fathers.

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.

My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father -- very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.

Didn't you ever have a father yourself? You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.' So I figured it's because I never had a father that I don't want one now. A person can't miss something she never had.

We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach ushow to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things.

People say you don't need a father to be successful. I take offense to that. I had an argument with my mom about Father's Day and why it's not celebrated like Mother's Day.

It's not that we have too much mother, but too little father. We can't forgive our mothers for taking the place of our fathers until we are ready to see that the point of a man's life is to be a father and a mentor, and we can't do that because we don't know how we would be a father or a mentor when we never had one.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.