“Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?” “Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…” The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn. “…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…” He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?”

“We're always taught that God wants us to always only say "I can't do this without You God" , "Whatever your will is God, that's my will too" but God says He is a father, and there is no good father who wants his children to have no will and to think that they can't stand on their own two feet. So maybe what you should be saying is "I can do it" and "I have a strong will, I know what I want." When you think God's left you and wants you to be sitting like a duck, maybe He's actually believing in you, teaching you how to fly.”

“When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.”

“The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.”

“And what could my father possibly want with another child, when he hardly bothered to talk to the one he already had?”

“I hope you don't really see yourself that way," I said.He turned to look at me and narrowed his eyes. "How do you see me?" he said softly.... "I think you're. . ." My voice went nearly silent. "Dangerous.""Why?" he whispered....". . . You make me think too much.".... "I can't help it, Alexis," he said. "I want to make you think too much. . . and then I want to hear the things you've been thinking. . . too much.”