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Fathers Quotes

Browse 224 quotes about Fathers.

Fathers Quotes

“As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)”

WarCourageHumourMoralityIraqResistanceAntiwarEnemiesCivilisationIraq WarWar On TerrorFathersSons
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we get in a situation is not the other person’s fault, rather it is our own hang-ups. A life filled with bias, hatred, judgment, insecurity, fear, delusion and self-righteousness can cloud the soul of anyone you meet. Our job is never to assume,instead it is to listen, communicate, ask questions then ask more, until we know the true depth of someone’s spirit.”

LoveChildrenChoicesFearRelationshipsAnswersCompassionFamilyChristianitySeeingCommunicationListeningFriendsAnxietyEmpathyJesus ChristDatingSeekingMental IllnessMothersNew YearBiasHomelessSistersQuestionsSermonsSeekersHoly GhostListenFamily MembersFathersStrangersFirst ImpressionsBrothersSelf RighteousnessChristmas SpiritBrainwashedNew PerspectiveResolutionsBenefit Of The DoubtDelusionsReaching OutMental DisordersChurch MembersKnowing SomeoneSpirtualEternal TruthsPromptingsRelgionAquaintancesNot SeeingPersepctiveExfamilyForgiving FamilyForgiving FriendsForgiving SistersWrong Impresssions
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.”

MenChildrenImportantJobsGirlFatherWomenWorkPowerfulFamilyBoysPowerProgressSocietyWallDadCivilizationOfficeAuthorityImportanceMalesEqualityCriticalNeighborSignificantEmploymentInequalityManWomanEmployeeGirlsSexismJobCrucialChildYardsWomanhoodPatriarchyUnemploymentFatherhoodManhoodFenceSubmissionHierarchyUrgentEmployersNeighbourPremisesFathersSexistMaleEmployeesBoyGraveBoyhoodWallsGirlhoodPivotalEmployerNeighborsMaterialChauvinismDadsPatriarchFather S DayMatriarchyVitalNeighboursMajorFencesDecisiveMomentousYardMatriarchOfficesCorporate LadderPremiseSexistsConsequentialWeightyHistoric SeriousOf Great ImportOf Great Moment
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“Since you haven’t got a name,” he said. “I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?” She stopped rocking and looked at him. “I can do that? It’s legal and everything?” He smiled. “It’s a free country again,” he said. “At least in theory.” She nodded. “And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?” He nodded. “What’s your name?” “Victor,” he said. “Vic, for short.” “Okay,” she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. “How do you spell that?” He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. “Can I be Victor, too?” she said, looking up from the pad. He smirked. “It’s a boy’s name,” he said. “You’re a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl’s name.” She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. “Victoria,” she said, passing the notepad back to the cop. “Hello, Victoria,” he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. “It’s nice to meet you, officially.”

NamesBoysGirlsFathersDaughters
Book:Atlas
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“Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him. But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend. At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free.”

GriefDyingComfortFathersDaughters
Book:Otherwise: new and selected poems
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“I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father. "God has lots of potential," he said. "When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?" "That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border.”

LifeDeathLossDyingRegretsFathersSons
Author:Sherman Alexie The Toughest Indian in the World
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“I grew up watching my father make plates that featured penises as centerpieces. Pink, proud, and stiff, encircled by cerulean Greek key, Dad’s creations made me feel scared and small. I saw a private part of the man I could not measure up to. At six years old, I lived in a world shaded by his ceramic glazes. There was love and color, but anger, too, in the way he kneaded his clay, palms pounding the rich, wet earth into shapes of his choosing.”

ArtSexFameFathersCeramics
Book:Fame Shark
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“I came to see I was not just alone; I was free. Free of him. Free to be. So many women's lives are hindered, hampered, and ruined by husbands who will not leave long after they have ceased to be husbands or fathers. Dead wearing a hat, these men actively and energetically visit untold woe on those they once had once. I was not thus afflicted I saw.”

EducationPovertyEmpowermentMotherhoodMothersFamily RelationshipsFathersFamily Support
Book:To My Children's Children
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“I came to see I was not just alone; I was free. Free of him. Free to be. So many women's lives are hindered, hampered, and ruined by husbands who will not leave long after they have ceased to be husbands or fathers. Dead wearing a hat, these men actively and energetically visit untold woe on those they once had loved. I was not thus afflicted I saw.”

EducationPovertyEmpowermentMotherhoodLegacyHardshipMothersFamily RelationshipsFathers
Book:To My Children's Children
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“Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.”

MomentsIgnoranceFriendsAuthorityStrategyMemoryBetrayalMothersFathersHorrorsFallible
Book:The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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“In my unhappiness I persuaded myself that my father's disdain for his daughter was the natural state of affairs, the healthy state, and my female nature was the plague. But here we are at the truth, and it is he who is sick and I am who am well. What is the poison in his body? Maybe it's himself.”

WomenMisogynyFathersDisdainFemalesFathers And DaughtersBeing Female
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10”

LiesMental HealthSexismSexual AbusePsychiatryChild Sexual AbuseNeurosisHysteriaFathersSexistIncestNeuronsSociety DenialFreudFamous PeopleCover UpChildhood Sexual AbuseSigmund FreudFather DaughterHysterical DissociationHistory Of PsychologySeduction TheoryAeitologyFamous PsychiatristsHistory Of HysteriaHistory Of IncestHistory Of PsychiatryStudies On HysteriaThe Aetiology Of Hysteria
Book:Father-Daughter Incest
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“Then, taking his hat and shoving it onto his head, he would rush out into the mass of busy people and all at once look nothing at all like Father anymore: in fact, if it were not for the particular way his hat had been squished ever since one of her wooden animals sat on it, Shelley would hardly have been able to tell his brown-coated figure from anyone else’s.”

WorkSocietyIdentityBusyFathersMeaninglessnessCorporate LifeBusy People
Book:The Shivering Ground & Other Stories
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“We are not called to fight the battles of our fathers with a blind faith. We are called to examine their wars, and moreover, to discern whether their actions were sinful or just. Furthermore, we are called to decide whether to correct the errors of our fathers battles through either peace, war, or some combination of the two. We are not bonded to our fathers' fate, but rather called to build on their trespasses or triumphs for a better future.”

LibertyDestinyFateFathersCristina MarreroTrespasses
Author:Cristina Marrero
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“They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.”

Human NatureLifestyleFathersLosersDrunksHuman FailingsDeadbeats
Book:The Spinning Heart
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“Perplexed and unhappy she would seek out her father on all social occasions and would sit down beside him. Like a very small child this large muscular creature would sit down beside him because she felt lonely, and because youth most rightly resents isolation, and because she had not yet learnt her hard lesson—she had not yet learnt that the loneliest place in this world is the no-man's-land of sex.”

LonelinessSafetyGenderParentsIsolationFathers
Book:The Well Of Loneliness
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“When I consider the men (like my father) I have treated in psychotherapy, I recognize the challenge I face as a counselor. These men are in counseling due to an insistent wife, troubled child or their own addiction. They suffer a lack of connection with the people they say they love most. Chronically accused of being over controlling or emotionally absent, they feel at sea when their wives and children claim to be lonely in their presence. How can these people feel “un-loved” when (from his perspective) he has dedicated his life to their welfare? Some of these men will express their lack of vitality and emotional engagement though endless service. They are hyperaware of the moods, needs and prefer-ences of loved ones, yet their self-neglect can be profound. This text examines how a lack of secure early attachment with caregivers can result in the tendency to self-abandon while managing connections with significant others. Their anxiety and distrust of the connection of others will manifest in anxious monitoring, over-giving, passive aggressive approaches to anger and chronic worry. For them, failure to anticipate and meet the needs of others equals abandonment.”

MenAttachmentFathersCodependencyLonlinessPassive AggressiveInitimacy
Book:Codependency & Men
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