To My Father Quotes

#1. We'll free as many as we can and build an army in the forest. It might take years, but I won't rest until every last Calorin is gone from these shores and my father is restored to the throne. - Corin

Claire M. Banschbach

#2. [i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT'S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]

Helen Oyeyemi

#3. I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.

Sean Lennon

#4. I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.

Hedy Lamarr

#5. Part of the answer to the question that life's roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my Heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Chrislike virtue.

J.I. Packer

#6. My father went to Rutgers, and I grew up in New Jersey, so I'm a great Rutgers fan. I have season tickets.

Peter Eisenman

#7. I want to be affirmatively proud of what I have made my way through. And to do that, in the same way I had to tell my father and my family and my friends that I was gay, I need to not hide this anymore.

Christine Quinn

#8. My parents were not musical, and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The music that I played was loud; it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn't have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do.

Don McLean

#9. My mother was so house proud that when my father got up to sleepwalk she had the bed made by the time he got back.

Chic Murray

#10. 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

#11. My father worked hard, but we were still very poor; and I didn't want anybody arguing about money, so I became the entertainer - the one who wanted everyone to be happy. I didn't want there to be any problems.

Diana Ross

#12. My father would not pay for me to study anything but engineering or math in college.

Teri Hatcher

#13. Well, father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I cast into the sea my useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and, consequently, perfectly free. (Eugenie to her father)

Alexandre Dumas

#14. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

Lauren Graham

#15. Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.

Quincy Jones

#16. My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side ... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life.

Lalo Schifrin

#17. My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.

Mark Helprin

#18. Now, I had been drawing all this time - especially in France of course - so, when I came back, my father gave me the chance to do a cover for one of the books he published.

Dick Bruna

#19. 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

#20. Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

Tom Shales

#21. When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.

Alison Owen

#22. I used to tell people my father was a plumber, because that would mean we had a normal life.

Nell Newman

#23. My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.

Gregory Corso

#24. Arthur spake, 'Behold, for these have sworn To wage my wars, and worship me their King; The old order changeth, yielding place to new; And we that fight for our fair father Christ,

Alfred Tennyson

#25. Don't. Please don't say it."
I search his eyes. For what, I don't know. "Why?"
"Because I don't want you to. I need you to come back to me. Not to help me. Or to help my father. I'm done with that. I don't want your help. It all boils down to you. I just want you.

M. Leighton

#26. And my father went back into the forest and chopped down a tree. The sound of the trunk fracturing and splintering and falling to earth was the sound his heart would have made, could it speak.

Sarah Winman

#27. The Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie was an unexpected, unplanned pop culture phenomena. My father went from star-maker to star.

Shawn Amos

#28. When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature who was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.

Marv Levy

#29. My father, Zeus, did not love me. The demigods at Camp Half-Blood did not love me. Python and the Beast and his comrades at Triumvirate Holdings did not love me. It was almost enough to make me question my self-worth.
No, no. That was crazy talk.

Rick Riordan

#30. There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.

Frederick Douglass

#31. My perception of life is not to ask Francois Hollande, who isn't the father of my children, to support me financially.

Valerie Trierweiler

#32. My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.

Ernest Istook

#33. As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies

Arthur Schopenhauer

#34. I quit my job in the bank when I was 19. I took a chance. I went to Milan to study opera and singing. My father really supported me economically.

Marcello Giordani

#35. As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

Bill Bryson

#36. My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.

Sidney Poitier

#37. When I sang my father's songs in concert, that was all people wanted to hear. I was always asking myself, 'Can I measure up?'

Natalie Cole

#38. My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#39. My father had a very simple view of life: you don't get anything for nothing. Everything has to be earned, through work, persistence and honesty. My father also had a deep charm, the gift of winning our trust. He was the kind of man with whom many people dream of spending an evening.

Grace Kelly

#40. I was a Yankee fan in Brooklyn because my father was a Yankee fan. And my father was required to live in Brooklyn with my mother's family, who were all Dodger fans. So he was surrounded by Dodger fans. He was a Yankee fan. So his revenge was to make me a Yankee fan.

Rudy Giuliani

#41. ~I gripped the knife even tighter. Far off in the distance, I could still hear them speaking, but only one thing was clear in my mind: Trevor, my father, was going to die.
From that moment on, I was Chloe Kallistrate, a vampire hunter.~

Jennifer Malone Wright

#42. Cal will never turn his back on his crown, on your father."
"I know my brother. If it comes down to it, to saving your life or saving his crown, we both know what he will choose."
"He would never choose me.

Victoria Aveyard

#43. We had idyllic summer holidays, building sandcastles with my father on the beach at Bridlington. It might sound strange, but I think that secure cocoon of familial love was so nourishing, it gave me the strength to live life on my own.

Kiki Dee

#44. I took my father on a coach trip last summer.We were halfway there when the driver lost control of the coach, it flew down a hill around a bend and crashed through a brick wall. I wasn't hurt but luckily my father had the presence of mind to kick my head in.

Chic Murray

#45. My best and worst boss was the same man - my father. He never - and I mean never - took 'I can't' for an answer. He taught me the value system that, to this day, I have continued to practice.

George Steinbrenner

#46. 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

#47. I want to know who killed my father," Peter growled, shrugging off her fingers and pushing himself away from the wall to stand up straight. "If you think you can help me with that, then you are welcome to try.

Deborah Blake

#48. I eventually made the reunion with my father that I'd used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we'd both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer needed a father.

Mona Simpson

#49. The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.

Rory Kennedy

#50. I also happened to sincerely believe in my father's message, though "believe" is perhaps the wrong word. Rather, I had not yet begun to question my indoctrination.

Frank Schaeffer

#51. In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone else.

Joyce Carol Oates

#52. Of course, my father was a soccer player. He used to play very good. Then, when I was young, eight or nine years old, ten years old, I just want to be like my father.

Pele

#53. My curveball is a blessing. My father taught it to me. He felt that it was a pitch he wanted me to learn, right on the side of the house, and it just ended up working. I never asked what the tricks were, or anything like that.

Gio Gonzalez

#54. When we decided to move West, I worried about how to defend my family and my stock from Indians, but I never worried about inheriting one!"
--from Prairie Grace when Georgia's father Thomas realizes gravely ill Gray Wolf has been left at their doorstep

Marilyn Bay Wentz

#55. There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Martin Amis

#56. My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.

Tony Visconti

#57. But I have forgotten to tell you how I came into the world, and am telling you my father's story instead of my own. You seem to like hearing about it though, and you can't understand one without the other.

Thomas Hughes

#58. I've always referred to my father as 'my coach' because we were always able to separate our relationship into the roles of coach and parent.

Sebastian Coe

#59. It didn't make much difference what time of night it was, whenever [my father would] come in drunk, he'd say, "Get up and sing me some songs." We didn't want to sing but we sang.

George Jones

#60. My mother, whose family was heavily rabbinic, said she wanted me to continue the family tradition in the rabbinate. My father said he wanted me to be a scholar of the Talmud, but he wanted me to make my living in science.

Norman Lamm

#61. My father-in-law saw me at a dance performance. The next day, I got a phone call, and the caller said, 'I'm Dhirubhai Ambani ... may I talk to Nita?' I said, 'It's a wrong number' and put down the phone. Then he called again ... and I said, 'If you're Dhirubhai Ambani, then I'm Elizabeth Taylor.'

Nita Ambani

#62. Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

Sitting Bull

#63. I'd once overheard my daddy tell my momma that the six Winston boys had inherited their father's ability to charm snakes, the IRS, and women.

Penny Reid

#64. My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.

Misha Glenny

#65. I love my mother. My mother made sure, her stubbornness - she made sure we was going to eat. She made sure we had Christmases. That was my mother. My father wasn't there for that.

Tracy Morgan

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. My father-in-law ... was a great inspiration to me both in life and in his preparation for death.

Billy Graham

#69. Once the interlude was over and I was released, I fled the room and, taking the stairs two at a time, found refuge in a dank corner of the basement filled with potatoes and mice. I stayed there until dinner, doing my best to stop crying by staring at the glowing face of my father's wristwatch.

Allen Kurzweil

#70. To me my father is my hero, my mountain and my drive.

Kim Young-kwang

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

Kyung-Sook Shin

#72. Across the board, from my mother to my father to my aunts and uncles, everybody has always given me a lot of love.

Amos Lee

#73. Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart.

Miles Watson

#74. My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science.

George Andrew Olah

#75. I know, being a father myself, what my interpretation of true love is, or the essence of love, and you can apply it to other things besides human beings.

Robert Stromberg

#76. One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave - arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.

Robert Dallek

#77. I wanted to grow up to be just like my father.

Michael Bergin

#78. The first time my father saw me in the flesh was on the stage, which is a bit weird. We went out to dinner, and he was charming and sweet, but I did all the talking.

Christopher Plummer

#79. One big contribution my father [Stephen Hawking] has made is to show that having a disability does not bar you from leading a full and eventful life.

Stephen Hawking

#80. My father would take me to the playground, and put me on mood swings.

Jay London

#81. 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

#82. Even if someone is competent, it's so damned easy to crucify him as long as he's only working on his father's account. So at the beginning I certainly wanted to prove myself to my father and the rest of society. That quickly turned into a greater challenge. My lifestyle hasn't changed as a result.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou

#83. I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

J.M.G. Le Clezio

#84. My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#85. When I knew I was pregnant four years ago with a boy, a friend suggested I call him Cary, but I initially resisted. There was only one Cary Grant. But a week before he was due, I started thinking it would be wonderful to pass the name on to him. And anyway, my father wasn't Cary to me. He was Dad.

Jennifer Grant

#86. My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.

Alexander McCall Smith

#87. You are my son, then, I'll tell you' and your mother was a wicked slut to leave you in ignorance of the sort of father you possessed.

Emily Bronte

#88. People are born with certain faces, like my father was born with a face that people want to hit.

Thom Yorke

#89. My father was in the army, and there wasn't too much money. Yet, we learnt to enjoy the small pleasures of life, to look at the positives.

Suresh Raina

#90. I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me.

Jon Krakauer

#91. While I didn't have a father around, I did have - and what I want my children to both experience - the ability to explore, experiment and enjoy life as a kid.

Kendra Wilkinson

#92. When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

Nick Flynn

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. Gradually, the physical cruelty and punishment beatings started and it got worse. He'd be on his knees to try to teach me how to fight, so my father made out. Whack! His hand would slap in to my face with the full force might of a 6ft 4in 18st man!

Stephen Richards

#96. 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

#97. My father could have been deported because on his immigration application he said that he was a printer, obviously because he didn't want them to be checking his writings.

Joe Eszterhas

#98. 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

#99. My father some times he goes crazy, but sometimes nerves, crazy and mad in one place it's like daemon have started to control his life so he ended his life.

Deyth Banger

#100. He[Crystal's father] had found my height amusing, referring to me as his "little girl" at every opportunity even though I could see the bald patch on top of his head fringed by curls when we stood side by side.

Joss Stirling