Few sons are like their fathers — most are worse, few better.

Three boys are desirable because one will probably die, while the second will stay home to tend the farm, providing for parents as they age as well as making enough money to send the third child to school so that he can get a better job and end this cycle.

Little brothers are the buck privates of life!

A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads – but you will only see one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him – but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep… Washing will hide him – voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him – blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him – doctors will drain him – jungle will claim him – wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him – tyrants will fry him… He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die before he is dead!

The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.

father could hope for in a son.To have

A king, realizing his incompetence,
can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither.
If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

Already there was a contest, always kept under the surface, between the father and son. It concerned ways of doing things, decisions to be made. As yet, the son always surrendered.

It is like that in a family, little isolated groups formed within the larger group, jealousies, concealed hatreds, silent battles secretly going on…

He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one’s convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

These caves are the original men’s rite sanctuaries where the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons but their fathers’ sons.