Anthony Powell Quotes

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

It is important for children to understand that some of the disappointment their parents feel for them is often really the parents' disappointment in their own lives.

A lot of times, you try and please your biological family, and you can't please them.

In my child's-eye view, whenever I was exposed to pain, it meant that my mother had let me down.

A father's disappointment can be a very powerful tool.

Anyone who grows up with parents who are very influential, there are cases where people run away from that if they have parents who are really lame.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

When I was born, my mother was very disappointed. She wanted a son. I knew that from a very early age. So I was a tomboy.

I think the Knight boys have a long history of disappointing their fathers.

It gets to you as a father when your kids don't react to you in the way you imagine.

I think probably everyone can relate to wanting to believe that your parents are one thing, and having to come to the realization that they might not be.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I danced six hours a day. My cross to bear is that my children have no interest in ballet. I think they could smell how much I wanted to put their hair in a bun.

I don't like to think of anyone waking up every morning amazed that things haven't gone their way in life.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

My dad died 11 years ago, I don't see much of my brothers, and I rarely speak to my mum. I don't hold a grudge, but being separated in those early years clearly had an impact. Our relationship didn't develop as it ought to.

I think, for me, with regard to my parents, my biggest fear was not that they would reject me but that I would disappoint them. That by coming out, I would simultaneously dash my own dreams and their dreams for me, and I was afraid of letting them down.

My father wanted a boy. I was supposed to be called Albert. That was probably the beginning of why things got so complicated, because I wasn't a boy.