397 Quotes About Fathers

We grant that which is ‘right’ this impenetrable notion, that it will prevail even when the worst of life repeatedly comes crashing against it. And when that which is ‘right’ succumbs to the assaults of that which is not, we must remember that evil may have had its day, but it’s just a day.

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.

I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.

What kind of world did our fathers abandon us to?

When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.

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.

You've given me a bad nameI'll only make worse.

The house's disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father's absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.

A man us measured by the depths of his commitments.