Single Parent Quotes

The issues facing working women and their families are closest to my heart. I decided to focus intently on the challenges military wives face because they juggle the same pressures as their nonmilitary peers, all while coping as single parents while their loved ones are overseas. I wanted to help make their voices heard. ~ Michelle Obama

I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back. ~ Steve Harvey

There is a core value I wanted to illuminate: No matter what kind of family you have - straight, gay, married, single parent, separated, no kids, two kids, 20 kids, whatever - we all go through the human comedy. But if the bonds are strong enough, and the desire is there, you can get to the other side, still together and still a family. ~ Lisa Cholodenko

I can understand why a single parent, working two jobs, would find it easier to stop at McDonald's with the kids rather than cook something from scratch at home. ~ Eric Schlosser

I feel completely safe in my house but all my friends are scared for me. And of course I can tell my parents panic a little. The best thing about living alone is being able to have my friends come over whenever. ~ Vanessa Hudgens

I became a mother before becoming sick, but i never expected sickness to take away my independent mothering, so i plant trees to sooth my soul from the aching pains of losing the maternal ability to mother another child. My first born will be my only treasure, the one who knew who i was before the mess entered our lives and also the one who adapted with me to a reality we weren't certain of oh and lots of plants and plants and plants. ~ Nikki Rowe

I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it. ~ Rick Moranis

The first thing he taught me was how to make love.
Before you laugh, know that I'd always hated that phrase. It sounded so corny, so old. Hippies made love. People my mom's age, though I preferred to believe I was an immaculate conception.
People my age hooked up, fucked, had sex. We didn't attach frilly ideas of oneness and eternity to a basic biological act. Most of us were from single-parent homes. Those who weren't wished they were when their parents screamed and beat the shit out of each other. We grew up sexualized, from toddler beauty pageants to the constant reminder that adults were waiting to lure us into vans with candy. The invention of MMS gave us a platform for the distribution of amateur porn.
That's a lot of conditioning to break through. ~ Leah Raeder

My daughter is, of course, perfect. Everyone's child is, but mine really is perfect. But I could not have raised her without my parents. From the time she was seven months until now, I have been a single parent. ~ Valerie Jarrett

It takes a tremendous amount of strength to be a single mother. To hold down the forte of a home, a life and your child's entire happiness. ~ Nikki Rowe

In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class husband and wife or a single parent over $10,000 a year. ~ Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

If you live with a single parent, you don't see compromise. You witness a grown person living in a world where they do what they want to do. When you are raised by two parents, you are constantly watching compromise take place. Just by observing that, it made me a better person. ~ Chris Rock

The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a "growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families." For ~ J.D. Vance

It's like I've experienced quite a weird and unusual life, you know, being with a mom who's a single parent and struggling with money and things like that. It's really hard. And it brings a lot of other insecurities in life and a lot of other issues in life, in school and a bunch of other things. ~ Fefe Dobson

My mom, for all intents and purposes, was a single parent. ~ Estelle

Passion has always been important to me. That won't change. What changes in a woman's perspective. I mean, I have two kids now. I'm a single parent balancing motherhood and my career. That changes the equation. ~ Jody Watley

When I wrote Lean In, some people argued that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don't have a partner. They were right. I didn't get it. I didn't get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home. I wrote a chapter titled "Make Your Partner a Real Partner" about the importance of couples splitting child care and housework 50/50. Now I see how insensitive and unhelpful this was to so many single moms who live with 100/0. My understanding and expectation of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled. Today almost 30 percent of families with children are headed by a single parent - 84 percent of whom are women. I ~ Sheryl Sandberg

I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round. ~ David Toop

At the end of the day, Esperanza stepped into Myron's office, sat down, and said, "I don't know much about family values or what makes a happy family. I don't know the best way to raise a kid or what you have to do to make him happy and well adjusted, whatever the hell 'well adjusted' means. I don't know if it's best to be an only child or have lots of siblings or be raised by two parents or a single parent or a gay couple or a lesbian couple or an overweight albino. But I know one thing." Myron looked up at her and waited. "No child could ever be harmed by having you in his life." Esperanza ~ Harlan Coben

The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence ("I want to cut his nuts out"), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician when the white community is listening, even if (especially if) the criticism happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in single-parent households). ~ Zadie Smith

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible. ~ Jonathan Sacks

Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue. ~ Moby

I don't think I realised how stressed I was, being a single parent. It was really, really stressful. It's not easy on anybody. ~ Reese Witherspoon

It is also of grave importance that society realize that children who are brought up in a single parent household can and do grow up loved, happy and successful. ~ Anonymous

I knew going in that being a single parent would be one of the toughest jobs I'd ever have. I'd been a talk-show host, actor, comic, and on and on, but this gig was going to be my defining moment. ~ Arsenio Hall

I've been a single parent for a long time. It reminds me of being a waitress. As you walk back to the kitchen, requests come at you from all sides. You're doing the job of two - you have to be highly organised. ~ Cherie Lunghi

You can raise good children in single parent households, and many of you perhaps here today come from that type of environment. It is possible and many do it in heroic situations, but it's much more difficult and the numbers move against us in a broad society. ~ Sam Brownback

It's really hard to deny a kid who's father has passed away. We all just wanted you to be happy so we messed that up. Your career wasn't about the money. Not at first. It gave you both something big to do so you could stay busy and forget how much you missed your dad." His heart twisted, and he whispered, "When I think of him ... I don't remember his face, but I do remember how much it hurt to have him simply there one day and gone the next ... just gone." Nan nodded. "Imagine how your mom felt. Your dad was the love of her life. ~ Anne Eliot

Loving and parenting a dog as a single parent can create all sorts of new and unusual problems, but also new sources of joy. ~ Jenna Morasca

Every single kid in my group of friends at school was from a single-parent family. ~ Christina Applegate

My family moved to Israel when I was eight until I was 10, and then we came back, and my parents split up. I was suddenly in a single-parent home and on scholarship. Fifth grade was such a hard year for me. ~ Natasha Lyonne

I was one of six kids in a single-parent household. ~ America Ferrera

Compared to children raised in an intact, married family, children raised in single-parent or cohabiting homes are significantly more likely to suffer psychological problems such as depression, to get into trouble with the law, to become pregnant as teenagers, and to drop out of high school.75 ~ W. Bradford Wilcox

The Creator of the universe longs to have a relationship with me. He is my Husband, my Provider, and my closest Confidant as a single parent.
~ Lorilyn Roberts

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home. ~ LeBron James

A few people had always made lousy choices. But how had a preexisting human propensity for self-destructive behavior exploded into a plague? As Mark's real, much more complete story - the one he didn't tell Berens - proved, it wasn't the increased availability of a drug like heroin, though that was gas on the flames. Lancaster's drug problem predated heroin, OxyContin, Percs. The problem wasn't caused by drugs at all, or government handouts, or single-parent families. While addiction could be as individual as people, common themes included alienation and disconnection. * ~ Brian Alexander

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again. ~ Mona Simpson

When you're in a single-parent home, they try to give you a good foundation, but by the time you're 4 or 5 years old, from that point on you're pretty much on your own. ~ George Foreman

I have 4 kids already, I don't need anymore. I'm a single parent. I'm taking them through Europe and make them play funny instruments. ~ Ville Valo

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction
who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did
without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! ~ Lionel Shriver

I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length. ~ Dirk Benedict

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home' ... ~ Julian Barnes

I don't have many hours in a day, as I'm essentially a single parent. But fortunately, I'm a really fast writer. My goal is usually 10 pages a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but by the end of the week, I aim for at least 10,000 words. ~ Michelle Gagnon

Things are very rudimentary as far as women's rights really go here, and it seems fine, but once you start scraping the surface, you start to see the ripple effect of how not having equal rights is so detrimental and how many mothers are single parents trying to raise their families. ~ Patricia Arquette

… when Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all of the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn't look like the hair of someone who never looks in a mirror - the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn't handle things. I clearly remembered the goal I had set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn't around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn't be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn't my habit to shave every day; I didn't mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family. ~ Herman Koch

And last, My mom. I don't think you know what you did. You had my brother when you were eighteen years old. Three years later I came out. The odds were stacked against us. Single parent with two boys, By the time you were 21 years old. Everybody told us we wasn't supposed to be here. We moved from apartment to apartment, By ourselves. One of the best memories I have Is when we moved into our first apartment. No bed, No furniture, And we just all sat in the living room And just hugged each other ... 'Cause we thought we made it. ~ Kevin Durant

Organization is the religion of the single parent. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I can never understand why people seem to think that growing up with unhappy parents is better than growing up with a happy single parent. ~ Sarah Morgan

We inhabit a three-body cosmos. Sophia is essentially the matriarch of a single-parent family - a single-planet goddess, if you will. But she relies on the support of the surrogate parents, sun and moon, to manage her terrestrial brood. ~ John Lamb Lash

There's a really unique relationship between a single parent and their child. Marriages so easily break up. There's kind of this temporary deal about marriages. That's one of the things that makes it stressful, and that's something that's nonexistent in a parent-child relationship. ~ Jeremy Sisto

Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent. ~ Jojo Moyes

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know? ~ LeBron James

I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I've never tried to be 'both father and mother' to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV. ~ Herman Koch

Single parenthood is hard, but it's simple too. You just do everything yourself. ~ Amy Dickinson

I believe in God, I just give him more credit than being a single parent and an author. ~ Bill Maher

Although white sociologists would have all Americans believe that the black female is often the "man of the house," this is rarely the case. Even in single-parent homes, black mothers may go so far as to delegate the responsibility of being the "man" to male children. In some single-parent homes where no male is present, it is acceptable for a visiting male friend or lover to assume a decision-making role. Few black women, even in homes where no men are present, see themselves as adopting a "male" role. ~ Bell Hooks

I was a single parent, and I was prohibited from working. ~ Alison Moyet

Faith should be a tool to set us free, not a means to fuel a fascist agenda seeking to impede the civil liberties of the "us"s. The first shall be last and the last shall be first ... therefore, those who stand for their Pius self-righteousness in order to trample those they deem inferior will be the 'last' and the poor and oppressed shall be 'first.' If the self-righteous want a lesson on morality, then actually take a lesson from Jesus whose best friend was a former hooker and whose mother was a single parent. ~ Cristina Marrero

Growing up an only child with a single parent is probably why I'm an actor. ~ Lauren Graham

Dr. Evil got shortchanged in the first one. The family dynamic between Scott and Dr. Evil - the adventures of being an evil single parent - needed to be explored. ~ Mike Myers

As you know, I'm a black girl out of the projects of New York City, raised in a single parent home because my parents divorced very very young ... welfare and homeless at four and then again at 16 and just not having the things or the necessary tools that society would say I needed to have in order to be any kind of success in life. ~ Kelly Price

If you are a single parent, make friends with others in similar situations and develop friendships with married couples. Counsel with your priesthood leaders. Let them know of your needs and wants. Single parenthood is understood by the Lord. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

There's no such thing as a single parent. They've become dependent on other people in commercial transactions, such as their employers and child-care providers. A single mother may look like she's doing so much 'on her own,' but she has merely commercialized the things the father would (and should) have done. ~ Jennifer Roback Morse

My mum Margaret was a single parent, but though life was a bit of a struggle she gave me every encouragement. ~ Ashley Jensen

My first love is my mother. She did so much for us as children as a single parent. I watched her make a dollar out of fifteen cents. I thought she was either a magician or she had God's actual phone number. She wasn't a motivational speaker; she was an inspirational speaker. ~ Betty Wright

The most difficult part of dating as a single parent is deciding how much risk your own child's heart is worth. ~ Daniel Pearce

Single parent situations drive poverty and often lead to unsupervised kids. Many boys growing up without fathers often feel angry and abandoned. Thus, they seek comfort in all the wrong places. ~ Bill O'Reilly

There are many stressed single parents who may be working two jobs in order to keep the family together. ~ C. Everett Koop

Being a single parent on a part-time basis is tricky to navigate. That is what a racing widow has to do. ~ Aly Grady

After Dad died, I told myself I wouldn't be one of those bratty kids who made it difficult for their single parent to date someone else, or to find love with someone else or whatever. I wouldn't be an obstacle to my mother's happiness. It's just that…well, I was operating under the assumption that she loved my dad, that they were made for each other, so she probably wouldn't find anyone else anyway. Now I feel that Grom had intruded on their relationship the entire time. That maybe they could have loved each other if it weren't for him.
And somehow I feel that since Mom and Dad didn't love each other, then I'm less…important. That I'm the result of an accident that is still complicating the lives of people I love. I also hate that I'm allowing myself to have a pity party when clearly bigger things than myself are happening.
Feel free to grow up at any time, Emma. Preferably before you push away people you love.
Grom retracts his hand from Mom's mouth, and uses his fingertips to caress her cheek. My new and improved grown-up self tries not to think Gag me, but I accidentally think it anyway. ~ Anna Banks

Well, I took a sabbatical. I walked away from shooting movies because I couldn't handle the travel. I'm a single parent. I had young kids, and I found that keeping in touch with them from hotel rooms and airports wasn't working for me. So I stopped. ~ Rick Moranis

I was not prepared to live as a single parent. ~ Annette Funicello

The best situation is being a single parent. The best part about is that you get time off, too, because the kids are with their mom, so it's the best of both worlds. There's a lot to be said for it. ~ Larry David

I can't imagine being a single parent or a single parent that doesn't have a lot of money. That's a big, huge impact on your life and your dynamic and everything - I mean, that's huge. It affects how much you have a break from just concentrating on just one other person in your life. It becomes so myopic that way, and more intense, probably. ~ Joan Cusack

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

There isn't anything a parent won't do for her child. There is no limit on love. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Your friends may influence your decisions even more than your parents will. ~ Robert Cheeke

If we will do our part and take a strong stand for our families, God will do His part. He'll help us to have great marriages and great relationships with our parents and children. ~ Joel Osteen

I have not been able to find a single useful institution which has not been founded either by an intensely religious man or by the son of a praying father or a praying mother. I have made the statement before the chambers of commerce of all the largest cities of the country and have asked them to bring forward a case that is an exception to this rule. Thus far, I have not heard of a single one. ~ Roger Babson

There's a lot of single black women who did the best that they could and that's a beautiful thing, but they don't know how necessary a father is in a kid's life and how much guys miss that deep down inside. ~ LL Cool J

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research. ~ Elizabeth Blackwell

She might be building a house around a single brick, but this brick was all she had. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents. ~ Sherman Alexie

The problem with our education system is not that parents do not have a choice. The problem is that inequities continue to exist. ~ Patsy Mink

It will be helpful to keep the following underlying themes in mind: Peace of mind is our single goal. Forgiveness is our single function and the way to achieve our goal of peace of mind. Through forgiveness, we can learn not to judge others and to see everyone, including ourselves, as guiltless. ~ Gerald G. Jampolsky

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world. ~ Allan Bloom

Games are unquestionably the single most important cultural form of the digital age. ~ Cathy Davidson

You have to separate yourself from your parents. You do. In order to find yourself. ~ Patti Davis

We often wonder that certain men and women are left by God to the commission of sins that shock us. We wonder how, under the temptation of a single hour, they fall from the very heights of virtue and of honor into sin and shame. The fact is that there are no such falls as these, or there are next to none. These men and women are those who have dallied with temptation
have exposed themselves to the influence of it, and have been weakened and corrupted by it. ~ J.G. Holland

There always are a basket of issues in any federal election campaign, but in this part of Australia [Capricornia] I can assure you having as you know a fairly frequent visitor to Rockhampton, that the issue of jobs and employment and where the jobs of the future are coming from, is the biggest single issue on people's minds. ~ George Brandis

The single problem plaguing all students in all schools everywhere is the crisis of disconnection. Meaningful Student Involvement happens when the roles of students are actively re-aligned from being the passive recipients of schools to becoming active partners throughout the educational process. ~ Adam Fletcher

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy. ~ Tobsha Learner

It seems like everyone these days is putting on a mask to feel beautiful, trying to fit into some pre-established norms of how we should look. This isn't only painful, it's ignorant. Saying like we know, better than nature does, what is beautiful and what is not is like a two-year-old lecturing an old man about patience. Nature's been creating beauty for millennia and you are part of that creation process. Stop the madness. Stop fighting who you are. Let the mask fall. It'll be strange at first, yes. But, over time, you'll see beyond the temporary discomfort of stepping outside social norms and learn to see the beauty you were born with, the beauty you've been taught to ignore and cover up. You'll see beauty that will take your breath away, like a sunset. That's how beautiful you are - like a sunset, like a forest, like a million fireflies on a calm warm night lighting up the sky. You are made by nature. Nature is wiser in the ways of beauty than cosmetics companies or magazines. Break the spell. Gain back your sanity. Go find that brilliant beauty within every single part of you. Go find the universe in your eyes. Remove that cloak that's been pulled over your eyes and see yourself for who you really are. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the "big five": neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness.15 These traits are facts about the elephant, about a person's automatic reactions to various situations. They are fairly similar between identical twins reared apart, indicating that they are influenced in part by genes, although they are also influenced by changes in the conditions of one's life or the roles one plays, such as becoming a parent.16 But psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels...

The third level of personality is that of the "life story." Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them wherever we can. (See those seven stars up there? They are seven sisters who once . . . ) It's no different with our own lives. We can't stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an "evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth."18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people's thoughts about you. The life story is not the work of a historian - remember that the rider has no access to the real causes of your behavior; it i ~ Jonathan Haidt

Single-minded concentration in the direction of your dreams intensifies your desires and increases your self-confidence. ~ Brian Tracy

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act. ~ Joseph Rotblat

I couldn't ask her anything. There wasn't a single question to which I'd get the answer I wanted. ~ Amy Bloom

Marcion: The God of the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are two different gods. Docetists: Jesus only appeared to be human. Arius: The Son was a created being of a lower order than the Father. Apollinarius: Jesus' divine nature/Logos replaced the human rational soul in the incarnation. In other words, Jesus' "pure" divine nature replaced the "filthy" mind of a typical human. Sabellius: Jesus and the Father are not distinct but just "modes" of a single being. Eutyches: The divinity of Christ overwhelms his humanity. Nestorius: Jesus was composed of two separate persons, one divine and one human. ~ Justin S. Holcomb

You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, and the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, breath of the fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and the colors fill your mind until there is nothing left to do but explode. There are no wrong answers. Inspiration is everything. Sit back, relax, and take it all in. ~ Jac Vanek

A real man - real in all the ways that we recognize as real - finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world - the real world - will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.

The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no "real" danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world.

Question: Is the man's behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of ethics. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson