“Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!”
Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance
“Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, / And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.”
Walt Whitman, Come Up From the Fields Father
“Father! – to God himself we cannot give a holier name.”
William Wordsworth
“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
“Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don’t misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence.”
Wm. Paul Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
“Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.”
Gloria Naylor
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
“I wish no one such a father; God sent me to you for a trial. Yes, for a trial! Hold out, children, to the end! Honour thy father and thy days shall be long. Perhaps for your noble conduct God will grant you long life.”
Anton Chekhov, The Father
“Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.”
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“The girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.”
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Ch. 9
“The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road.”
Angelo Patri
“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
“What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.”
Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.”
Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
“You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t? I’LL take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey? — who told you you could?”
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 5