“Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely.”

“another family story is forges, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.”

“He [my father] wasn't as bad towards me as he was to mum. Just absent.”

“Hugh had led men into battle with success and was on reasonably good terms with the king, though they would never be intimates; in any case, his father had been so close to his king that this would probably have to suffice for whole generations of Dipensers.”

“Boys do not long for fathers who will usher them through the gauntlet of psychological disconnect. They long for fathers who have themselves survived intact. Boys do not ache for their father's masculinity. They ache for their fathers' hearts.”

“I wanted a song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A portuguese song, but not a portuguese. song. A new world song. A song branded with the new world. I thought of the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress. Her father, the master. Her daughter's father. The father of her daughter's daughter. How many generations. Days that were pages of hysteria. their survival depended on suppressed hysteria.”