Father's Day

'Honour thy father and thy mother' stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness.

Well, my daddy left home when I was three, And didn’t leave much to Ma and me, Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now I don’t blame him because he run and hid, But the meanest thing he ever did was Before he left, he went and named me Sue.

 

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. . . . This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity. . . . What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus.

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

[ Explaining why he did not consult his father, former President George H. W. Bush, on the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 :] There is a higher father that I appeal to.

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.

How easily a father's tenderness is recalled, and how quickly a son’s offenses vanish at the slightest word of repentance!

My brother Bob doesn't want to be in government - he promised Dad he'd go straight.

Few sons, indeed, are like their fathers. Generally they are worse; but just a few are better.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

If you and your child were going to be lulled tomorrow/would you not give him to eat today?

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens . . . to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

“She is the child of the universe.” “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

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.

Greatness of name in the father oftentimes overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow lulls the growth.

About 60 years ago, I said to my father, “Old Mr. Senex is showing his age; he sometimes talks quite stupidly.” My father replied, “That isn’t age. He’s always been stupid. He is just losing his ability to conceal it.”

A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born.

There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.