Like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, he was a wellborn victim of Uberangstlichkeit, a mama's boy who reached his fullest dimensions in following maternal orders to be mercilessly ambitious.

How easily a fathers tenderness is recalled, and how quickly a son's offenses vanish at the slightest word of repentance!

Any father whose son raises his hand against him is guilty: of having produced a son who raised his hand against him.

You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.

This is what a father ought to be about: helping his son to form the habit of doing right on his own initiative, rather than because he's afraid of some serious consequence.

Our genes keep unfolding as long as we live. Harry tastes in his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father's breath. Poor Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.