"When the Emperor Was Divine" - Quotation Collection - The Father

[Robin Nourie]

One of the first times we hear about the father is in the opening chapter when the girl is remembering her summer piano recital. We are told "Her father had sat in the front row...and when she was finished he had clapped and clapped."  From this little scene, where the father chose to sit "in the front row" and enthusiastically applauded his daughter's performance, we get a sense of how much the father adored his children, and encouraged and supported them.

[jschwartz]

"His father was a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar" (62)

[jpl...@gfsnet.org]

“HIS FATHER used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You’re my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy’s short black hair. “Hush, Puppy,” he whispered, “it’s all right. Here I am.”

“Her father had sat in the front row of the audience and when she was finished he had clapped and clapped. She played the piece all the way through without missing a note. When she began to play it a second time the boy got up and went to his room and began to pack.”

[jpl...@gfsnet.org]

Whoops robin took my second one
“The woman did not close her eyes. She knew exactly where her husband was. He was sleeping on a cot—a cot or maybe a bunk bed—somewhere in a tent at Fort Sam Houston where the weather was always fine. She pictured him lying there with one arm flung across his eyes and then she kissed the top of the bird’s head.

“I am right here,” she said. “I am right here, right now.”

She gave the bird a sunflower seed and he cracked the shell open in his beak. “Get over here,” he said again.

She opened the window and set the bird out on the ledge.”

[Lil'Donut(Lilly Dupuis)]

"He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his 56 years."

[jpl...@gfsnet.org]

Here are two more for the father
“HIS FATHER WAS a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child, had loved to kiss. “Does it hurt?” he’d once asked him. “Not anymore,” his father had replied. He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions. I guess you could say that’s my forte. Whenever the boy knocked on his door his father would look up and smile and put down whatever it was he was doing. “Don’t be shy,” he’d say. He read the Examiner every morning before work and he knew the answers to everything.”

And
“All right, I said. I admit it. I lied. You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it.”

[mstan...@gfsnet.org]

"his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling "Begin the Beguine" through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet, "Here it comes champ", his father would say, one hobo egg sandwich."

This shows he is a loving father who is very upbeat, as he is whistling Frank Sinatra, and loves his son dearly, as he calls him champ and makes him breakfast.

[eo...@gfsnet.org]

"The summer before last her father had hired an Indian driver-  a Hindu, he had called him- to take them to Yosemite and they had stayed at the Ahwahnee hotel for a week. She had bought the deck of cards at the gift cards shop and her brother had bought a red wooden tomahawk. Everynight they had eaten dinner in the fancy dining room beneath the chandeliers." This shows how the father is able to provide for his children, in terms of wealth they are well off.

[jesse kahn]

“Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you...she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...”