Jason Isbell Quotes

Anyone who's a parent dreads that call in the middle of the night. I have four grown children and I still dread it.

I constantly worry about my family and my kids. 'Are they O.K., what are they doing right now?'

Parents fear for their children. Absolutely, I think it's a deep and troubling theme to explore.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer.

Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.

I just can't stand the fact that they're going out on their own - I love having my kids around, and I'm angry at them for going out and becoming independent. I want to tuck them in and drive them to school in the morning, but they just won't let me do that anymore.

In 1962 I was diagnosed with this incurable disease.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Serious is when they tell you, 'You've got cancer.' Cancer is serious, but then the rest of it is not.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.

I go to sleep thinking about my kids being spoiled and I wake up thinking about it.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

I normally sleep very well, but when I do have bad dreams, they always involve my children.

I think any parent, at some time or other, has thoughts of their child dying. That's probably one of the worst things that could ever happen to a parent.

'The Road' is about that fear that all parents can have - 'What's going to happen to your child if you're not around?'

The anxiety of most parents in seeing their sons and daughters enlist does not lie only in the fear of the physical dangers they may encounter.

On my daughter's first day of kindergarten, another mom said something that made me realize I had become my own Greek, suffocating mother. She said, 'Just think, in 13 years they'll leave us and go to college!' And I went, 'Gulp.'

I have cancer. It's in my brain... What are you gonna do about it?

In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend every day praying that I didn't come across that virus. She'd have worried like that.

I'm terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.

My consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come at any moment.

They didn't tell me what type of cancer I had. They didn't tell me what stage I was in. They just told me, 'Mr Gomez, you have cancer.' My life flashed before my eyes. I thought about my kids, I thought about my wife. Nothing prepares you for the shock of someone telling you you have that horrible disease.

I've overcome tuberculosis and my life was at risk.