"But Old Man Stark looked at the Boss, and said, "I sorta reckined--I reckined you was gonna stay out here tonight." There was any trouble figuring out what he said, though. The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn't got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It's not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium. Anyway, that is what I would have said back then, that evening."
--p.35, the novel "All the King's Men"
In the author's perception, this yearning for possession of one's children's life, as described in the paragraph, is distinct from love. And it is interesting to note that this distinction made by the author has never been stated in any Chinese film or article that I have encountered.
