#father

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s. ↗

— E.L. Doctorow

#father #courage

Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you. ↗

— Ally Carter

#fathers-and-daughters #together #death

About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying. ↗

— John McGahern

#father #sickness #death

In life or death situations, my father has only been there once for me. So I'd like to tell him thanks for not pulling out when I needed him the most: conception. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#death #family #father #life #death

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fathers #mortality #sons #writers #death

I never knew my father. I saw him at a party once, but he never walked over and introduced himself to me.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#father #funny #humor #introduce #introduction

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking. ↗

— Jesse Cozean

#jesse-cozean #memoir #my-grandfather-s-war #patton #world-war-ii

Oh, my father, such a difficult man. His world turned on his axis. From "The Father Tamer" in BREATHE IN ↗

— Eileen Granfors

#discipline #families #father #love #secrets

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father. ↗

— Arthur Miller

#fathers-and-sons #family

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity. ↗

— Isadora Duncan

#fatherhood #feminism #marriage #men #freedom