Top 100 Quotes About My Father's Death
#1. Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died.
Kiki Smith
#2. 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
#3. My father's death took me to a place I had never been and a place I had never left. In his absence, I've had to rely more on myself.
Gustavo Perez Firmat
#4. The bastard. How dare he? I was drowning in a fucking river that he was still attempting to save me from, and he was telling me he was going to push me back in and hold me under. My father's death had nearly destroyed me. Cal's death would finish me.
T.J. Klune
#5. My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing [my mother] for something she couldn't help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father's death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.
Suzanne Collins
#6. I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'
Linn Ullmann
#7. I should kill you," Kallan whispered, "and watch your blood run with the cries of my people. If I kill you, all my troubles end. And I go home to Lorlenalin, my father's death avenged.
Angela B. Chrysler
#8. My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say.
Simon McBurney
#9. I'm not interested in using my father's death as some touch point for why I've become an actor - it's grossly opportunistic.
Cate Blanchett
#10. Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.
Alison Bechdel
#11. You will revenge my father's death and we will be one tribe across the face of the plains, one people. As it should always have been. Let the Tartars fear us then. Let the Chin fear us.
Conn Iggulden
#12. My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.
Brooke Shields
#13. After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more.
Elie Wiesel
#14. And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows. (p.223)
Niall Williams
#15. My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.
Philip Schultz
#16. My father's death was the most terrible thing that happened to me in my life.
Judy Garland
#17. When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
Frederick Buechner
#18. My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.
Zoe Wanamaker
#19. I hadn't been fighting because of my father's death. I fought because of his dreams.
Brandon Sanderson
#20. My mother's one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.
Peggy Guggenheim
#21. The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.
Gloria Estefan
#22. I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
Mark Slouka
#23. It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.
Don DeLillo
#24. I am very emotional. It took me many years to recover from the death of my father. Even when I was playing cricket, I wasn't happy. I would just sit and cry. I was very young. He was too young; he shouldn't have gone. Cricket is all right. We all play sport. Good and bad days come.
Harbhajan Singh
#25. Kyros's strength left him, and he dropped to his knees. Xanthus was at his side immediately. "Hades, Kyros. You look like death." "He looks nothing like my father." Thane coughed
Holly Kelly
#26. Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.
William Shakespeare
#27. My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
Tana French
#28. The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.
Jamie Wyeth
#29. When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#30. I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.
Seamus Heaney
#31. Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.
Rory Kinnear
#32. I was the first face you saw when you were born, you were bald as my hair ran black. Now yours the last face I saw before I died, your hair ran black, as I was bald.
Anthony Liccione
#33. The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
Sebastian Barry
#34. My father was a man of love. He always loved me to death. He worked hard in the fields, but my father never hit me. Never. I don't ever remember a really cross, unkind word from my father.
Johnny Cash
#35. My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, literally without education.
Abraham Lincoln
#36. Forbid me not to weep; he was my father;
And, had you lov'd him half so well as I,
You could not bear his death thus patiently.
Christopher Marlowe
#37. My life comes down to three moments: the death of my father, meeting my husband, and the birth of my daughter. Everything I did previous to that just doesn't seem to add up to very much.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#38. Yet I have often noticed since how much less stir nearly everyone's death makes than you might expect. Men better loved and more worth loving than my father go down making only a small eddy.
C.S. Lewis
#39. With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
Orhan Pamuk
#40. Let's be honest, the world's always been a scary place with very little charm. I try to brush it off as I've brushed off the flu, as I brushed off the death of my father when I was young, as I've brushed off so much since Benton has known me.
Patricia Cornwell
#41. God calls us to a wild adventure, not a tea party, my dear. I don't follow Jesus because he can give me a life without pain. I follow him because he is good. Someday I will follow him right through death, and into our Heavenly Father's house.
Aunt Wealthy
Martha Finley
#42. I had learned from my own father's death many years ago that the end of one's life and dying are two very different things indeed, and took solace in that.
Jasper Fforde
#43. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.
At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
No, I did not.
Because you weren't sad?
Because it was nobody's business if I was.
Khaled Hosseini
#44. I kept asking myself if I felt different, if I was different. The answer was always yes. I was no longer nothing ...
How odd, I thought; it had taken my mother's death, Father Quinel's murder, and the desire of others to kill me to claim a life of my own.
Avi
#45. My father's mother, my Grandmother Young, was said by the family to have talked herself to death. Convalescing from a fever, she had defied the doctors and gone right on talking.
Stark Young
#46. When death comes, she said, all that matters is this: to be next to one another. My mother was wearing a silk dress, and as she pressed her fingers into his, all of my father's adventures and hard living melted away. He knew that he had met the woman he would love until he couldn't love anymore.
Hannah Tinti
#48. In my father's later years he asked several times that I remember him the way I knew him. He said that after his death, people would talk. They would say 'things' about him and he wouldn't be there to defend himself.
Jennifer Grant
#49. My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.
Leonard Mlodinow
#50. My father chose my name , and my last name was chosen by my ancestors . That's enough, I myself choose my way
Ali Shariati
#51. My father used to say that stupid people think. (I really don't agree with him!)
Deyth Banger
#52. The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.
Joel Osteen
#53. My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.
Andrew Cuomo
#54. When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. 'I lost one, too,' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)
John Irving
#55. At the worst it can only be death, and a man's death is not a calf's, and the dreaded Hereafter may still be open to me. God help me in my task! Goodbye, Mina, if I fail. Goodbye, my faithful friend and second father. Goodbye, all, and last of all Mina! Same
Bram Stoker
#56. I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
Ian McEwan
#57. I don't fear death. I remember my last meeting with my father when he told me, You know, tonight when I will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me. It makes me weepy ... but I don't think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me.
Benazir Bhutto
#58. I think that even though my father wasn't there, in his death and in his memory, he has been a mentor to me in my manhood because my mom couldn't teach me how to be a man.
Francis Capra
#59. How very sweet. My dear," he said, speaking to Alex, "I imagine he's willing to give up the information because he fancies himself in love with you. Don't you see? Your life simply isn't worth the pleasure of avenging his father's death. It's touching, really." Alex
Sarah MacLean
#60. In an area of more than 1,000 war graves and with birdsong as the only sound, I contemplated the thin margin between life and death. If the sniper's bullet had been just two feet to one side, my father's life would have been over, aged just 27, and I would never have been born.
Michael Ashcroft
#61. I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.
Richard Flanagan
#63. Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death.
Sherman Alexie
#64. Look: Words did not frighten my father. They scared the shit out of me. I almost couldn't believe I'd worked up the guts to ask the question and not choke to death in the process. But words were the atoms in my father's universe, and he was their destroyer and their creator.
Andrew Smith
#65. My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John Updike
#66. My father ran a corner drug store where he worked night and day, seven days a week, until he died of a stroke. He literally worked himself to death.
R. T. Rybak
#67. Excuse me. You may remember eating my father, Captain Hook? I'm here to avenge his death. Farewell, hideous beast.
Heidi Schulz
#68. I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child.
Walter Mosley
#69. My father-in-law ... was a great inspiration to me both in life and in his preparation for death.
Billy Graham
#70. Just as a snowflake
went on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, the
pumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,
and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, my
father's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea.
Katherine Dunn
#71. At the age of 16, my father's father dropped dead of a heart attack. And I think it changed the course of his life, and he became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients.
Sally Mann
#73. My father was a doctor so I was around death all my life. So, I was very used to it because he was a f-king doctor.
Joan Rivers
#74. Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.
Richard Smalley
#75. Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?
Hugo: No.
Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.
Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#76. In the will of God" is not a matter of intellectual discernment, but a state of heart ... It's motto is
" My Father can do what he likes with me, He may bless me to death, or give me a bitter cup; I delight to do His will.
Oswald Chambers
#77. My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?
'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#78. Had you crawled out from under my bed when I was a child, I would have bludgeoned you to death with my father's mace." Brishen
Grace Draven
#79. My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#80. Father's Day was great, but all the family gatherings brought up my mother's death. Maybe it's me, because I am a wimp. We would get together, but there was someone missing!
Doug Davidson
#81. My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious - to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.
Edvard Munch
#82. Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me.
Carl Sagan
#83. I had a choice. My instincts told me to hurry up and give the choking man the Heimlich maneuver. My brain told me to stay still until he expired and chalk this one up to divine intervention.
Dinah Katt
#84. We brought death to our enemies, and I loved the power of it. And that final love, one I shared with my father, frightened me more than any battle ever could.
Patricia Briggs
#85. You can only understand how someone else needs to handle death in the given, specific moment. There are few hard and fast rules. I understand both my father and my friend. Or rather, I understand neither and so allow both the dispensation the ignorant should grant the wise.
Kate Sweeney
#86. Upon the death of my father, our family and myself were emotionally and financially exhausted.
Sam Sheppard
#87. Of course he was there, a removed audience
of my redemption songs from beyond the grave,
the way Kafka and his father continued to shadow-box,
long after they quit staring at each other
at the dinner table.
Thabo Jijana
#88. If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;
and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,
then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
Laurence Sterne
#89. Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
Evelyn Waugh
#90. I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.
George Washington
#91. I don't mean to sound like a touchy-feely California type here, but I knew that I could finally get over the death of my father only by having kids of my own.
Kara Swisher
#92. My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.'
'Oh.'
'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all.
Anna Funder
#93. When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184)
Katy Butler
#94. I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.
Madeleine Thien
#95. If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.
Sachin Tendulkar
#96. I have had a fascination with death, I think, that might be considered genetic for a long time. My father had the same affliction, I guess.
Sally Mann
#97. Since the death of my father four years ago, our lives have become difficult, and I must help my family.
George Washington
#98. My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.
Roz Chast
#99. At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words.
John Dufresne
#100. I didn't cry when they buried my father - I wouldn't let myself. I didn't cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match.
Greg Garber
