Family

I believe family first. Blood is thicker than water. I grew up like that, and I want to continue to keep that goal in my heart. Just family first! Just honesty, integrity, and respect. All of that. I live by the code of those things. If you do that you'll be fine.

In person, my father is so friendly, so considerate, so funny, and so real. I have admired my father all of my life, and I love him with all my heart.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

Don't be in a hurry to achieve your dreams. Take a day to play with your kids and relax - your dreams will still be there tomorrow.

I first read Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' as a teen in school, like you did. I read the book alone, eating lunch at my locker, neatly scored oranges my mother divided into five lines with a circle at the top, so my fingers could dig more easily into the orange skin. To this day, the smell of oranges reminds me of 'Mockingbird.'.

When a child is immersed in a certain environment, his thinking is formed by roles models of behavior demonstrated by parents in the family who have had a great influence on the formation of thinking of the child.

Genealogy was her favorite insanity.

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

I think there's something about the homemade birthday cake, because my wife, on my daughter's first birthday, started the tradition where she takes a full cake and cuts the number birthday out of it.

He's a chip o' th' old block.

When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.

My dad liked to boil a squirrel head and suck the brains out the nose. Smaller than a chicken, bigger than a rat.

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the 'hour' of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

Right mothering meets the child’s need. Focusing on what the child should not be draws resistant energy. Pointing out what the child should be feeds self-hatred and struggle.

MOM—Mistress Of Miracles.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Our children want more than presents, that want our PRESENCE.

I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.

A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.