#fathers

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

When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment. ↗

— Jane Smiley

#fathers #fathers-and-daughters #men

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him. But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend. At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free. ↗

— Jane Kenyon

#daughters #dying #fathers #grief #music

The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. ↗

— Antoine François Prévost

#fathers #french-literature #nature

I ask for a lot of advice from different fathers - all kinds of dads. ↗

— Hank Azaria

#ask #dads #different #fathers #i

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power. ↗

— Norman Thomas

#faults #forefathers #freedom #given #loved

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery. ↗

— Colin Powell

#about #argued #congress #court #deal

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers. ↗

— Chauncey Depew

#had #instead #landed #landing #pilgrim

It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children. ↗

— James Earl Jones

#be real #because #both #children #enough

I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did. ↗

— Francis Schaeffer

#come #conclusion #did #feels #forefathers