Childhood
James' father was an Oklahoma preacher in occasional poverty for a decade until 1973 at Red Fork Church of God in Tulsa. At times they had to live in the church office. Money and spirituality were central to him. "The hardest part of my childhood was reconciling how Dad poured his heart into his work, how he helped so many people and yet he couldn't afford to pay for haircuts for me and my brother," Ray wrote in his 2008 book Harmonic Wealth. "How could a loving God keep me from Cub Scouts on account of not being able to afford a uniform?" However, a classmate of James recalled that "Ray always dressed well and knew he'd make something of himself."
Read more about this topic: James Arthur Ray
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
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“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)