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Father Quotes

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Father Quotes

“I think for my parents it was like "A Boy Named Sue," the Johnny Cash song. A guy named Sue tries to track down his father to take it out on his father for naming him Sue. And his father says, "Look, I knew I wasn't going to be around. So I gave you the name so that you would grow up strong enough to take the hits and fight back." So I like to believe that's why my parents gave me this stupid name.”

“I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order of decrepit, stammering, journeymen-teachers as well as from the new weak ones, who are generally no better for popular instruction, and entrust it to the undivided powers of Nature herself, to the light that God kindles and ever keeps alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favour with God and man.”

“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.”

“Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.”

“In giving our daughter life, her father and I had also given her death, something I hadn't realized until that new creature flailed her arms in what was now infinite space. We had given her disease and speeding cars and flying cornices: once out of the fortress that had been myself, she would never be safe again ... We disappoint our kids and they disappoint us, and sometimes they grow up into people we don't like very much. We go on loving, though what we love may be more memory than actuality. And until the day we die we fear the phone that rings in the middle of the night.”

“I grow old, I grow old, the center will not fold. In youth I had hardening of the categories and looked for the father and the mother in every lover. Then I cracked. Then I fragmented. Then the old man in my soul found the god in herself, not in some Jungian fairy tale but in the flesh that fell from the bones and the words that came into my mouth when the look went out of their eyes.”

“Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another.”

“The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring”

“The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”

“Today's fathers and mothers--with only the American dream for guidance--extend and overextend themselves, physically, emotionally,and financially, during the best years of their lives to ensure that their children will grow up prepared to do better and go further than they did.”

“Now are the days, of humblest prayer, When consciences to God lie bare, And mercy most delights to spare. Oh hearken when we cry. Now is the season, wisely long, Of sadder thought and graver song, When ailing souls grow well and strong. Oh hearken when we cry. The feast of penance! Oh so bright, With true conversion's heavenly light, Like sunrise after stormy night! Oh hearken when we cry. Oh happy time of blessed tears, Of surer hopes, of chast'ning fears, Undoing all our evil years. Oh hearken when we cry. Chastise us with Thy fear; Yet, Father! in the multitude Of Thy compassions, hear!”