My Father In Quotes

#1. In my day, when you called on a girl, her mother was always hollering down to see if she was still unraped, the maid would look in, her father would shuffle his feet in another room. Today the boy calls up, says, 'Meet you at the back door of Stern's.'

Frank Crowninshield

#2. My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

Audrey Meadows

#3. I was always falling in and out of love. I was engaged when I was 16 to the first guy I ever dated, but my father told him I was too young.

Dorothy Hamill

#4. If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.

Maureen Howard

#5. My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.

Wesley Clark

#6. There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it ... expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.

William Monahan

#7. During the late '20s my father left us. My mother was in a complete hole with no money, and we were evicted.

Vidal Sassoon

#8. I wondered what the FML post would look like.
"Today, when my father tried to shoot me, I found out he was an assassin monger who's been keeping my mom locked away in a secret facility for freaky killers. FML."
Seriously. F.M.L.

Jus Accardo

#9. My father did not bother that I play not a classical music. He always congratulated me for my development in music, I mean in any music but, he hang on to continue training at the Academy of Music ... however, I never mentioned to my teachers that I trained myself at weekends in clubs.

Richard Clayderman

#10. When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.

Caroline Lawrence

#11. I grew up in the Baptist Church, and going to church with my father; I remember being 8 years old, trying to determine whether I was really ready to give up sin, and for days I agonized.

Oprah Winfrey

#12. I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

Roz Chast

#13. My mother was always deeply attracted to anything medical, and I think she would have loved me to have been a doctor. My father was in the army for 21 years, came out just before I was born. There was no history of showbusiness on either side of the family, but they were completely supportive.

Lindsay Duncan

#14. If I have one special memory, it was when we recreated the trial of the Chicago Seven - and I'd known about it before - but this was a pivotal moment in my life. If my father had been found guilty of conspiracy, I wouldn't be here.

Troy Garity

#15. As a result of listening to Aberhart, my father decided to leave the farm in 1927 to study at Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, Aberhart's training school.

Preston Manning

#16. 'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

Jonathan Raban

#17. If I was good each week, my father would take me to a different pet store each Saturday. I had a snake, horny toads, turtles, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs ... I kept my alligator in the bathtub until it got too big.

Dick Van Patten

#18. 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

#19. My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.

James Costos

#20. I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

Toby Young

#21. It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.

Paul Mellon

#22. I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

Stephen King

#23. In hindsight I can see that my love for the arts began by watching my father and his colleagues perform on stage in Jamaica, and running a muck among the exhibits of fabulous Jamaican art at the National Gallery while mum was upstairs curating.

Michael Hyatt

#24. Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Gore Vidal

#25. Radio was my life growing up. Then, I started in our family band with my uncle, my father, my aunt and my little brother. We would go to The Chicken Box and all the bars and play.

Meghan Trainor

#26. I did not give my daughter the kind of childhood anybody would want. The vision of the divided loyalty between a mother and father who don't live together and don't share in decisions is a great depravation for children.

Gail Sheehy

#27. More than fifty-five years ago my father told me, "The Bible does not belong on the shelf but in your hand, under your eye, and in your heart."

Martin Niemoller

#28. I don't have a father, but my kids tell me every day that they love me ... even when I am not in my best mood.

Boman Irani

#29. My parents had never been showy or romantic; it was only after the loss of my father that I began to understand how truly in love they had been, in their quiet way.

Anonymous

#30. My father was a director, and he used to always tell me, "You should be an actress." When I was 17, he gave me a job so that I'd be in the union.

Katey Sagal

#31. 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

#32. I am unlike most other people because I began, not in the body of my mother, but in the brain of my father. He invented me, you see. He sat down one day and dreamed me up. -- The Girl With Borrowed Wings

Rinsai Rossetti

#33. Genuine surrender says, "Father, if this problem, pain, sickness, or circumstance is needed to fulfill your purpose and glory in my life or in another's, please don't take it away." This level of maturity does not come easy.

Rick Warren

#34. I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

Khaled Hosseini

#35. I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?

Howard Barker

#36. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

Winston Churchill

#37. Initially I had intended to study medicine, but before going to University I had decided that I would be better suited to a career in which I could concentrate my activities and interests more on a single goal than appeared to be possible in my father's profession.

Frederick Sanger

#38. The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

James Fallows

#39. Heavenly Father, may your will be done in my life, in Jesus Name. Amen

Lailah Gifty Akita

#40. My dad came out of the Roosevelt era and the Depression. One person and one party made a difference in his life. That's what everybody forgot when they called my father and other people political bosses.

Richard M. Daley

#41. I didn't have parents, so I lived in people's homes ... And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother.

John Lone

#42. I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

Jared Kushner

#43. My father was a journalist for 50 years in Leeds and Fleet Street. I thought about a career in business to show I could do something different, but the reaction among prospective employers was, shall we say, underwhelming.

Lionel Barber

#44. My heroes always are mostly my parents - my father especially, and my mom, who's passed on already. My dad is a very strong man, and by him being educated, and a principal and school superintendent over 37 years, he plays such a big role in my life.

Dikembe Mutombo

#45. Obviously, at this age, I've lost people in my life. But with a parent, it's just different. I was very attached to my father and had this naive little-girl notion that he'd always be around. So I'm finding acceptance of my father's death is the hardest thing to accept.

Carol Leifer

#46. Remember that time I punched you in front of my father's grave? I ask in a sentimental voice.

Beth Revis

#47. I've played a lot of fathers in my life, and it seems that my kids are getting older and older in films, and I'm always surprised at how good they are.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#48. And how, exactly, do you think I see the world, Mr. Kessler?" Ben leans back in our booth without breaking eye contact with my father. "Through the closed eyes of an arrogant asshole.

Colleen Hoover

#49. My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

Kirk Douglas

#50. In truth, I barely knew my father at all. He was 53 when I was born, and when I was ten he contracted cancer. Eight years later, in 1979, he died.

Rory Bremner

#51. My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.

Kate Christensen

#52. My father was Catholic, and my mother wanted me to go to Catholic school. That's what I did in first grade. But she couldn't afford the payments. I think it must have hurt her a lot, not to be able to give me a Catholic education.

Edward P. Jones

#53. I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

Jack W. Szostak

#54. All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else
first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

Sue Monk Kidd

#55. From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

Harper Lee

#56. I think people like to think I'm in some way financially dependent on my family - on my dad - but the fact of the matter is I've been emancipated from my father since I was 14 years old. That's something people don't know or understand.

Devon Aoki

#57. The first thing you should know about me is when I was three years old my mother left me and my father. And that was traumatic obviously for my father - he suffered a nervous breakdown at that time in his life.

Robert Carlyle

#58. In school they told us the president was the best man in the whole country but I knew my father was the best man in the whole country; the country didn't know it, that's all.

Rita Mae Brown

#59. I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Rupert Murdoch

#60. My mother and father took me in and provided everything for me - the love, nurturing, basic necessities - to give me the space to grow wings, so that when I went out into the world, I could fly.

Michael Franti

#61. I walked behind my father on the way to her headstone, he looked like a house that was caving in.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#62. I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.

Bernard Hill

#63. People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.

Anthony Liccione

#64. The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

John Irving

#65. I got married, going to become father soon, being No. 1 in the sport that I love with all my heart. I mean, it's pretty awesome.

Novak Djokovic

#66. I graduated from Jones College, man, in Jacksonville, Florida, baby! I couldn't get in anywhere else, man. I was the worst student ever. I couldn't get in anywhere else. My father insisted I go to college, so I graduated, made the dean's list and everything.

Joe Piscopo

#67. I used to say that my own father was dead, because he might as well have been. He was in Argentina and didn't play a part in my life. He and my mother divorced when I was only two.

Olivia Hussey

#68. While this has been a private part of my family's life, it is now clear a media story will soon emerge. My father tragically ended his life while battling terminal cancer in 1979.

Bill De Blasio

#69. Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

Roy Blount Jr.

#70. My parents had a wonderful marriage, but it was a very dependent relationship. My mother was entirely dependent on my father because that's how it was in those days.

Erika Slezak

#71. Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.

Marc Forster

#72. My father is a very hardworking guy, and that's his focus in life, so I got a lot of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather.

Donald Trump Jr.

#73. My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.

Henning Mankell

#74. Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

Anthony Horowitz

#75. You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a ... very brutal disciplinarian.

Lynn Johnston

#76. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

Vladimir Nabokov

#77. I was very fortunate to have some great mentors. A father that was always in my life set the example every day at home. Everybody asks me, 'What was your role model?' My role model slept 20 feet from me every night. I could always go talk to him and ask him questions no matter what it was about.

Larry Fitzgerald

#78. My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

Walter Kohn

#79. I believe my father has and always will be the strongest influence in my life, as he has guided me on many paths.

Apolo Ohno

#80. I went to watch my father at Silverstone in the early 1950s, and I've still got the car he was in.

Nick Mason

#81. The anecdote was funny, but as my father gazed across the river at the university of his youth, his Russian life was in his eyes.

Paullina Simons

#82. At least with my father, the danger was out in the open. I knew what to expect. But Auntie Cath is a different kind of dark altogether.
The worst kind.
The kind made from love.

Dawn Kurtagich

#83. My mother is very good in Scrabble. In Boggle, my father is probably better.

Chelsea Clinton

#84. My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

Greg Kinnear

#85. My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that's what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me.

Stephen Richards

#86. I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

Audre Lorde

#87. My father was in the civil service. I can remember standing in a bus shelter in the pouring rain, and that we were allowed candy floss at the end of the holiday if we had behaved.

Honor Blackman

#88. O powerful goodness! Bountiful Father! Merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my power for thy continual favours to me.

Benjamin Franklin

#89. There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances.
'Did he bite you?' said Father.
'No,' said Frances.
'Did he scratch you?' said Mother.
'No,' said Frances.
'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.

Russell Hoban

#90. My father, born in Colorado, met my mother, born in Switzerland, when he went into the finance company where she worked and asked for a loan.

Susan Straight

#91. My father was a very successful businessman, but he was ruined in the stock market crash. A big stockbroker jumped out the window and fell on his pushcart.

Jackie Mason

#92. My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

John Darnielle

#93. My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

Donald Johanson

#94. Being different doesn't make you broken. Look at me, I'm the smallest elf in all of the AAD. My father was a toy soldier, yet I have no discernible skills whatsoever. I might feel a little lost at times, but I'm not broken

Charlie Cochet

#95. My father was indeed a musician, but he was a weekend warrior. He was a welder, actually, and worked all his life at the Ironworks in Beloit Wisconsin, and he played in a swing band on weekends.

Robin Zander

#96. I had an experience of knowing the Polish people when I was a child, and where my father worked many Poles came to work after the war. They were good people, and this has stayed in my heart.

Pope Francis

#97. I used to just daydream all the time about being in movies, from the age of, like, four onwards. I would sit down and watch movies with my father and my grandfather, and always pretended that I was in the stories.

Aneurin Barnard

#98. My father once told me that anyone who worked for three dollars an hour owed it to himself to put in four dollars' worth of work.

Bill Russell

#99. I testify that Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, was and is the Only Begotten of the Father, the Lamb of God. He chose from before the foundations of the earth to be your Savior, my Savior, and the Savior of all we will ever know or meet.

Henry B. Eyring

#100. I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.

Tessa Thompson