Fathers
Quotes - Parenting isn't something you do
“The psychological absence of
fathers can be nearly as devastating as physical absence. When fathers are
alive but not a predictable presence actively participating in their daughter's
lives the relationship becomes a permanent "maybe.”
― Victoria Secunda,
Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in
Your Life
“If there’s one thing I
regret it’s not having told my father how much I admired and loved him. My only
gesture of affection was a quick kiss on the forehead two days before he died.
The kiss tasted like sugar and I felt like a thief who furtively stole something
that no longer belong to anybody. Why do we hide our feelings? Out of
cowardice? Out of egotism? With a mother it’s different: we cover her with
flowers, gifts and sweet phrases. What is it that prevents us from
affectionately confronting our father and telling him, face to face, how much
we love or admire him? On the other hand, why do we curse him under our breath
when he puts us in our place? Why do we react with wickedness and not affection
when the occasion presents itself? Why are we brave with taunts and cowards
with affection? Why did I never tell my father these things but I tell them to
you, who are probably too young to understand them yet? One night I wanted to
speak to my father ion his room but found him asleep. As I quietly began to leave
the room, I heard my sleeping father, in a desperate voice, say: “No, papa,
no!” What strange, agitated dream was my father experiencing with his father?
And if one thing caught my attention, beyond the enigma of the dream, was that
my father was seventy-eight years old at that time and my grandfather had been
dead for at least a quarter of a century. Does a man have to die to speak to
his father?”
― Juan Gabriel
Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas
“The true test of a father’s
legacy is that it rests in every life except his own, for to leave a true
legacy we must divest ourselves of everything so that the investment in our
families can be everything.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
“When fathers are lovingly
involved with their daughters from birth, the daughters reap the benefits all
their lives. Daughters who had fathers they could count on are the most likely
to be drawn to men who treat them well, to see their lovers as dependable
people who won't suddenly disappear, and to be consistently orgasmic.”
― Victoria Secunda,
Women And Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man In
Your Life
“But many more daughters of
distant fathers are unable to reach orgasm, or achieve it with consistency with
any man. Indeed these daughters have the most trouble in bed: for them,
affection and arousal are synonymous with rejection.”
― Victoria Secunda,
Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in
Your Life
“We were a religious sect
consisting of two people, and now half the congregation was gone. There would
be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely
depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world
at a time.”
― James Marcus
“Parenting isn't something
you do. It's who you are. You are a mother. You are a father.”
― Mandi Hart,
Parenting with Courage: Shaping Lives, Leaving a Legacy
“The measure of a man is
determined by the distance between his knees and the ground. The less the
distance, the greater the man.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
“For all children, mothers
are their first love, their first acquaintance with intimacy, touch, warmth,
tenderness, sustenance. Infancy is a conspiracy between mothers and their
babies, a bond that fathers can only helplessly witness, denied the profound pleasure
and pain of giving birth.”
― Victoria Secunda,
Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in
Your Life
“Idealizing Daddy is grand
when you're five; it's crippling when you're twenty-five or thirty-five. For if
you still believe in Daddy's miracles, you may not believe that you can make
your own dreams come true. Worse, you may not even be able to formulate them
without his guidance,”
― Victoria Secunda,
Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in
Your Life
“What kind of world did our
fathers abandon us to?”
― Andrew Smith
“There should be some drug
for fathers of teenage girls. Something that calmed your heart so it didn't
practically rip through your chest. Something that could soothe the fury your
daughter could inspire, the absolute terror that something unspeakable would
happen to her, the almost murderous sense of protection. Something that would
give you the words to tell her that no one would ever love her as much as dear
old dad, and if she just listened to him, she'd have a much easier time of
things and be safe from boys who ruined her life.”
― Kristan Higgins,
Until There Was You
“I always thought I hated the
bastard, but knowing that I'm never going to get the chance to tell him how
much I hated him breaks my heart.”
― Sarra Manning, The
Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp
“Let me tell you youngins
something. See yawl are half-baked like your fathers. The first mistake yawl
made was coming to my place of business without hesitation. You don’t come in
your enemy's territory because obviously I have shit set up to defend myself.
Second, I’ll give yawl credit for doing something halfway smart. I know you two
would have some of your own people in here posing as club goers, but I have
people checked at the door. So, your men have been disarmed. Third you can’t
make business moves with me, so I suggest you two drop this shit. Yawl quest
for revenge is admirable but it’s over. I’ll let the other shit yawl have done
to us slide as a fair pay for what we did to your fathers.” - Cyrus”
― Shantel Williams,
Love Songs and Bullets
“I had found I could best be
a good daughter by making sure my father never guessed what to forbid.”
― Jackie French,
Ophelia: Queen of Denmark
“You've given me a bad name
I'll
only make worse.”
― Ari Banias, Anybody: Poems
“Once upon a time a daddy
believed that a mysterious light was more than a mysterious light, that a
meteor was more than a meteor. He believed in probabilities and prophecies, in
wild turkeys and girls wearing headbands in the rain. He believed in the power
and the glory of a quartet of cotton swabs, believed he'd glimpsed the future
in a minivan bumper.
Dear,
you would never believe all the silly things this silly daddy believed.
But
he was not crazy because he believed what he'd seen. And what he'd seen, he
believed, was you.”
― B.J. Hollars, This
is Only a Test
“Their father - her
ex-husband - had relinquished all responsibility for them when the marriage
ended: it almost gave him pleasure, Lawrence believed, to see them suffer,
partly because their suffering dramatized his own - as bullies enjoy seeing
their own fear in their victims - and partly because it was a sure-fire way of
punishing (her)”
― Rachel Cusk, Transit
“As I liked him less and less
I became more and more like him. I felt trapped, didn't care for myself.”
― Geoffrey Wolff, The
Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father
“The future? Like the past,
like the present. Little girls who lose their fathers cry all their lives. Hard
to blame Edgar for her tears: no doubt she makes Edgar the cause of them. He
says so often enough. Mona and Minne shall not lose their father, she is
determined on it. She will cry now and for ever, so that Minnie and Mona can
grow up to laugh — though no doubt their laughter, as they look back, will be
tinged with pity, at best, and derision, at worst, for a mother who lives as
theirs did. Minnie and Mona, saved from understanding. ("The Man With No
Eyes")”
― Fay Weldon,
Mischief: Fay Weldon Selects Her Best Short Stories
“If financial gain remains
our main motive then we can be certain that rich fathers will leave behind poor
sons!”
― Gunther Hauk, Toward
Saving the Honeybee
