What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own. Edward Hoagland
About This Quote

What defines a person? A person is defined by his or her actions. It takes great courage to tell others about how they should act when you yourself are not living up to the standards that you preach. If you are not living up to your own standards, then you can’t expect others to follow in your footsteps.

Source: In The Country Of The Blind: A Novel

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  1. What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't...
  2. Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep
  3. She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.
  4. Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.
  5. The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for..depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly...
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