“It's just like a child who hides the sheets after he wets the bed. You ran away... And you know it.”
Van Hohenheim Quotes
2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A Philosopher's Stone in the shape of a man, carrying the souls of Xerxes and four centuries of not knowing what to do with them. Absent as a father and unusually precise as a witness.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Edward... Use my life for the toll. Use me to save Alphonse. I've got just enough life left.”
An offer that is literal accounting rather than sentiment. Hohenheim is a Philosopher's Stone in the shape of a man, carrying the souls of everyone Xerxes lost, and alchemy in this series has never once let a transaction happen without a toll. So the last thing he can usefully do as a father is present himself as currency, which is both the most generous and the most horrifying thing available to him.
Read Van Hohenheim's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Filed by most viewers under absent father says something cruel, and it does come from the man who left. Look at what it corrects, though. Edward burned the family house down and has been carrying that as resolve, a bridge deliberately cut; his father identifies it as concealment and picks the least dignified image available to say so. Nobody else in the series tells Edward anything that unflattering and that accurate.