Top 100 Father Growing Up Quotes
#1. I was adopted by a Salvadorian mother and a white father. Growing up having complete identity crisis. Then my search for my mother and trying to find out why I was given up, and how could a mother give up a child, then finding out the circumstances of my birth was pretty traumatizing.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#2. I didn't have a father growing up, and I was raised with all women, and I didn't really understand men. I thought they were like women, right?
Rene Russo
#3. These two Joes - the nasty bully and the starry-eyed dreamer - were my father. Growing up, the difficulty was knowing just which Joe would rise with the sun that day.
Pythia Peay
#4. Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not.
Carew Papritz
#5. When I was growing up, I grew up in church
my father was a pastor
so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.
Heather Headley
#6. My parents were divorced and I didn't grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound.
Laura Linney
#7. Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.
Meghan Trainor
#8. When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
Judy Blume
#9. But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Tobias Wolff
#10. I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#11. Without you there would be no me.
I am everything reflected in your eyes.
I am everything approved by your smile.
I am everything born of your guidance.
I am me only because of you.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#12. I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.
James Gray
#13. I used to live on a reserve, but I went back and forth between my reserve and Ottawa where my father lived, so I kind of had a double life growing up.
Kaniehtiio Horn
#14. Growing up, I didn't know about families who were missing a father, because there weren't any in our neighborhood. Today over a third of American children are born into single-parent homes. Is this all men's doing?
Timothy J. Russert
#15. People ask me from time to time what it was like growing up with Henry Fonda as my father. I say, Ever see Fort Apache? He was like Colonel Thursday.
Peter Fonda
#16. I've always loved writing, and my heritage has been interesting, growing up in a bi-cultural family. My mother being Vietnamese and my father being French, it's like an East-West meeting in my house.
Mylene Dinh-Robic
#17. So many of our young women today, they're growing up without a father, but they're still thirsty for that and desiring positive male love.
Hill Harper
#18. My father is a fire chief and was a fire fighter when I was growing up and I always looked up to him. So, I found out about 911 dispatchers, not something I had ever thought about, and put in for it.
Cameron West
#19. Growing up, around the dinner table my father and I didn't talk sports. We talked business.
Jared Kushner
#20. I just wanted to compile these stories about growing up with my father and I wanted people to be able to enjoy them individually, but also the entire book as a whole.
Justin Halpern
#21. Well, my father was in the Army and we traveled quite a bit when I was growing up, and I thought that I would like to have a military career, although I was drawn more towards the Navy.
Marc Garneau
#22. When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem, he and his friends liked to trade desserts after diner.
Naomi Shibab Nye
#23. My father actually lived next door to Hobie Alter [creator of the Hobie catamarans]. So growing up, we had prototypes and experimental things that we could play with; it was just fabulous. I actually bought my first surfboard in junior high. I saved my money.
Bo Derek
#24. I grew up without a father, and my mother grew up without a father and her mother grew up without a father. So we have this long heritage of growing up without fathers.
Gloria Gaynor
#25. As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
Eugene Jarecki
#26. Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.
Roma Downey
#27. I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.
Ira Levin
#28. Growing up, I stayed in a child's place. My father was murdered when I was 20. I was a model and never had a real job and my parents took care of me.
LisaRaye McCoy-Misick
#29. I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.
Pete Hamill
#30. 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.
Catharine MacKinnon
#31. I never trusted the police. It was just something you were taught growing up in the ghetto, especially when your father ran dope. "Can
Porscha Sterling
#32. When I grew up, my father taught us the value of hard work. He wanted us to enjoy ourselves, but he also wanted to know what it took to be successful. He coached a lot of our sports teams growing up. We weren't very good, but we learned about hard work and enjoying life and your teammates.
Andrew Luck
#33. Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.
Orson Scott Card
#35. I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.
Courtney Love
#36. When I was growing up, there was always somebody who wanted to pick a fight with me. I'd say, I'm not a famous boxer, my father is. If you want to fight somebody, go fight my Dad.
Richard Gibbons
#37. I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.
Colm Toibin
#38. One of the things about being a boy, especially growing up without a father, is you really don't have that role model to teach you how to do things.
Art Alexakis
#40. I remember as a teen being able to eat more than my father. I was growing so fast and my body couldn't keep up.
Saskia De Brauw
#41. When I was growing up, we spoke Egyptian, we ate Egyptian food, we had other Egyptian friends. It was my father's preference.
Leila Aboulela
#42. When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
Jeff Kinney
#43. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.
Jacqueline Woodson
#44. And though I had misgiving--obvious ones, too--one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I'd need him. That's what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn't wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?
Peter Geye
#45. When it became clear that in fact my father was saying, "It will be interesting to see what you want to do when you grow up," I realized that there was no pressure on that front. And I remember huge relief: Hey, I can go and do what I really know I have to do!
N. T. Wright
#46. At least he took the rest of the food I brought him. A growing boy fighting his insane father to the death has to keep the calorie count up there. Fighting to the death is sweaty work.
Barry Lyga
#47. I always appreciated that connection between a parent and a kid because I yearned for it so much. Growing up, I wanted a father, and because I've had this idea of what a father should be, it's exciting to finally have the opportunity to try and be that guy, to see if I can actually do it.
Freddie Prinze Jr.
#48. I read my father's books growing up. I thought then and I still think now that his writing is wonderful. It delights and infuriates me in equal measure that he's still that good.
Nick Harkaway
#49. I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.
John Mortimer
#50. My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.
Steve Albini
#51. No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both ...
Carew Papritz
#52. My father was never very friendly. When I was growing up, I thought the doorbell ringing was a signal to pretend you weren't home.
Rita Rudner
#53. Because my parents, growing up, they worked hard. Everyone in my family woke up early in the morning. I used to see my mother and my father go off to work, and come back and, no matter what, they had time for the kids.
Herschel Walker
#54. My father and I rarely saw eye to eye when I was growing up. We saw the world differently. It was only when we were both adults that we were able to share spectacles. However, football, and particularly the World Cup, was when we, enemy combatants, could traverse trenches and be together.
Rabih Alameddine
#55. I grew up in a family that my father was a very, very, a person with so many ideas, so many new visions and dreams. For me to grow up in that family, that also helped me to have a vision to create and open boundaries and things. So I think it's like, it just comes from the family.
Hafez Nazeri
#56. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
Cory Booker
#57. I knew from the time I was a young girl that I was destined to be a writer. I'm incredibly stubborn. The more someone tells me I can't do something, the harder I work to prove them wrong. My father's nickname for me when I was growing up was 'Hardhead.'
Lori Wilde
#58. When I was growing up in the 50s it wasn't quite the same. Fathers were more protective and now they see all of the possibilities for their daughters.
Nancy Pelosi
#59. In my entire life growing up I've never heard my dad say an unkind word about anyone. My father has always taken the high road in life and to me he's a complete inspiration without being a pushover.
Hugh Panaro
#60. I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.
James D. Watson
#61. My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#62. When I was growing up in New York City, my father was a taxi driver for a time.
Diane Lane
#63. When I was growing up, I never really knew my father. I didn't get to know my father until I was about 14 years old.
Cole Hauser
#64. My father was a local radio celebrity in the Albany area while I was growing up. That was his dream when he was a boy. I learned from him that some dreams are attainable and the penalty for inaction is regret.
Jonathan Weeks
#65. Growing up, my father was a financial analyst for an oil company. He was just a regular dad. And when I would say, 'Hey, come see my play,' he'd say, 'Sure.' He'd see one, 'Oh, good play' - you know, very typical dad reaction.
Eric McCormack
#66. If fathers aren't growing up, I would challenge them to want to be a father that is present in the home, so that their kids have that identity.
Benjamin Watson
#67. To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.
Per Petterson
#68. My mother's an artist. My father was an artist and so I assumed that was normal growing up in art and the art world and spending our time around the world seeing art, experiencing things. It was great.
Bran Ferren
#69. Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. 'Wayne's World' was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and 'Austin Powers' was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.
Mike Myers
#70. My father was a very disciplined singer who worked hard at his craft, and I was around that growing up.
Bobby McFerrin
#71. When you grow up in the [film] industry, the director is your father. You follow your father's lead, but you make your own way.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#72. For me, growing up, the downside of it was that as a kid you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a famous father let alone get a job because of your famous father, you know? But I'm a product of nepotism. That's how I got my foot in the door, through my dad.
Jeff Bridges
#73. My father said, Don't grow up to be a woman, and what he meant by that was, a housewife ... without any interests.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#74. My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
Jason Kilar
#75. All I knew growing up was that my father was married to and loved my momma, period. He worked hard, made some money, and put it on the dresser. She spent it on the family, and he went out and earned some more. He taught me the most about love.
Steve Harvey
#76. But it was dreadful to think of Henry, slowly or swiftly corrupted by his detestable father and mother, growing up with the fat slime of their abominations upon him.
Arthur Machen
#77. I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
Steven Spielberg
#78. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.
Markus Zusak
#79. Mexican music runs through my veins. I loved it. Growing up, my father didn't allow us to listen to English music at home. That's all I heard. I had no choice.
Jenni Rivera
#80. I would want my children to grow up and do what they wish to in a field that they choose to step in. They should not have to use the shadow of their father's name. I think that is a bit of a downer for a movie star's children.
Shahrukh Khan
#81. I was an outcast growing up with a bunch of Christian people. My father didn't go to church, and that was not good news if you lived right in the middle of it.
Del Shannon
#82. Of course there's some things that I would have liked to have ... none of my friends growing up had their father in the house. None of 'em. We had uncles and stuff like that, but nobody had a father in the house, none of my friends.
Kenyon Martin
#83. My father worked on assembly lines in Detroit while I was growing up. Every day, I watched him do what he needed to do to support the family. But he told me, 'Life is short. Do what you want to do.'
Anita Baker
#84. My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
Sara Zarr
#85. I've been very blessed. My parents always told me I could be anything I wanted. When you grow up in a household like that, you learn to believe in yourself.
Ricky Schroder
#86. If there was one thing in particular that he had learned by growing up in his father's house it was this: how to annoy people.
Brandon Sanderson
#87. My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.
John Dyer
#88. I had a cookie business there, with my brother, when we were growing up, called the Chip Yard, and that became the inspiration for the banana stand. My father said that he wanted us to develop a work ethic, so we'd sit there selling cookies, all day.
Mitchell Hurwitz
#89. I just gravitated toward (working behind the scenes by) growing up on the different sets and watching my father and other people in their different capacities ... When I was 13 years old, I asked for a Super 8 camera.
Michael Landon Jr.
#90. When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"
Cate Marvin
#91. And, as my father used to tell me growing up, "Play it beautiful, play it beautiful." He said, "I don't care if you don't hit all of the notes. If you don't move a person's heart, it's not music."
Christopher Parkening
#92. You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.
Carew Papritz
#93. My father played guitar, so I always wanted to play for that reason. But I think the biggest reason was just the '90s in general - growing up listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and bands like that, and going to concerts and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world.
Jack Antonoff
#94. Growing up with my father's legacy, we never felt that we had to do anything, but we were always raised to think: What could be better than to explore the wonders of the world and share that with people? To try and make the world a better place. And I guess it stuck.
Philippe Cousteau Jr.
#95. Most young people seem to be behaving very intelligently: They look at things once in a while, but then they find it so idiotic and uncool that they just look away again. That is, provided they're not growing up in a family in which a drunk father is already watching pornos in the morning.
Volkmar Sigusch
#96. My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#97. My father, Arinze Ejiofor , was a musician and a doctor. Nobody's ever asked me about that combination and what growing up in that environment was like.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#98. When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, "When did you start feeling like a grownup?" His response: "Never.
Shannon Celebi
#99. My father was Abe Burrows, who was a Broadway legend. 'Guys and Dolls,' 'How to Succeed,' 'Cactus Flower,' '40 Karats,' 'Can-Can,' 'Happy Hunting,' 'Reclining Figure,' it goes on. He was a legend, and when I was growing up, I was Abe Burrows' kid. That was my self-esteem.
James Burrows
#100. Losing my father at a tender age was hard, and I felt it more so while growing up when I needed a father to talk to. Especially while pursuing an acting career where I would have loved his guidance and advice, since it was his passion as well.
Ajay Mehta
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