#fathers

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#daughters #death #fatherhood #fathers #god

My dad kept giving me "love pats." Love pats are soft punches of encouragement that are administered on the knee, shoulder, and arm. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#love #love

And if you are a mom who has watched your child’s father leave, my heart goes out to you. I also pray that you had no part in it. I pray that you didn’t make it impossible for him while he was there. I pray that you didn’t try and force him to live up to impossible expectations. And, I pray that if he is a good man and he wants to be there in his child’s life that you love your child enough to let him. Even if that seems impossible to you. ↗

— Dan Pearce

#dads #fathers #parents #love

She didn't have a daddy?" I asked. "No." "Did you have a daddy?" "You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#fathers #single-parenting #love

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#daughters #expectations #fathers #ideals #perception

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons. ↗

— Herodotus

#bury #fathers #peace #sons #their

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#fathers #generations #knowledge #relationships #sons

I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless. But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did. ↗

— Candice Bergen

#agreed #being #did #dispensable #endless

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives. ↗

— Jürgen Moltmann

#knowledge #life

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. ↗

— Edna O'Brien

#either #emotional #fathers #mothers #reserved