The main threads running through the lives of W. A. Clark and his daughter Huguette include the costs of ambition, the burdens of inherited wealth, the fragility of reputation, the folly of judging someone's life from the outside, and the tension between engaging with the world, with all its risks, and keeping a safe distance from danger.
I often say that I inherited the family's recessive gene for adult-onset political activism.
A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
Dad was that one person who, no matter what he did in life, he just took it by storm, and he was so passionate and just really lived in the moment. Whatever the opposite of a procrastinator is, that was him... and I think I kind of inherited a little bit of that.
We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
Obama's extraordinary political skills suggest he is more than capable of rising above any personal historical grudges he may have inherited.
My dad was a big grinder, a tough guy. I inherited that from him.
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
My father had a good sense of humour about a lot of things, including life, which I think I inherited.
