Lack of Guidance Quotes

If there is an authoritarian structure at St. Hill it has been brought into being by the government itself. St. Hill is trying to correct itself. It doesn't know what it's trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own and finally, also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop.

There are no clear paths. Only pitfalls and tripwires and darkness.

I know there are a lot of kids who aren't lucky enough to have a father figure in their lives. That's a really tough obstacle to overcome.

I don't even know how to speak up for myself, because I don't really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you're always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.

There was no precedent. If I asked somebody, 'What do you expect me to do?' they all looked blank. They had no idea; nobody had much idea.

What do you do with a textbook case when no one's written the textbook?

I know what it's like to not know where you're going or how to get there. I know what it's like to have no one around you who can teach you how to be what you hope to become.

A youth's knowledge is like a cheap shotgun-likely to do as much damage to the owner as to the game.

But no one can blink at the fact that in this land, and in other lands across the world, there is an epidemic affecting the lives of millions of youth. It is a sickness that comes of a loss of values, of an abandonment of moral absolutes. The virus which has infected them comes of leaderless families, leaderless schools, leaderless communities. It comes of an attitude that says, "We will not teach moral values. We will leave the determination of such to the individual."

When I lost my dad, there was no one there to be the disciplinarian, and we kind of ran amok.

It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.

There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

It's not good to be in a situation where people don't want to direct you or don't want to question something.

The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.

My stepdad didn't have a father growing up, so he didn't know how to have a father-son style conversation. Plus, we had a tense relationship in which he never really offered me advice.

When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids.

Thank you, Sam," he said in a cracked whisper. "How far is there to go?" I don't know," said Sam, "because I don't know where we're going.

Some players have no idea how to handle life without structure. That's why some players get into trouble during the offseason. This is literally the first time in our lives we've ever had free time without somebody telling us where to be and what to do.

We did not have anyone like a manager, who could guide us and make it happen.

Why were there no buoys in life to show you the way?

My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.

No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.