Father Quotes - Page 290

Arthur Miller said one of my favorite lines ever, that he had the mother say to her two sons about a very unstable father in Death of a Salesman. She said, "Attention must be paid." It's one of the most resonant lines that I think he ever wrote, and I think attention must be paid to the truth.

Many fathers go their entire lives without announcing how sexy their son's old girlfriends are.

Being a father is the hardest job on the planet, because we don't have parental instincts like women have. You have to learn how to be a father before you even become a father, from a very young age. It's necessary to override what we're told in society a father should be, like if your son falls and scrapes his knee, you got to be tough. Baseball and all that are cool, but it's the tenderness and interactions that are really important. Boys are different; we have to impart that sensibility and that tenderness to them.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

Several weeks of summer vacation in the Thirties I spent working at $15 a week in the FORBES office.... I worked in the mail cage, where envelopes were slit and subscription payments extracted. Dad used to come pounding down the office aisle and pause long enough to ask, How much today? Inevitably the answer was inadequate-except once. That day the controller said excitedly, Mr. Forbes, the ledger shows a slight profit this month! ... My father turned to him and said, Young man, I don't give a damn what your books show. Do we have any money in the bank?

I would never become an alcoholic like my father because my father deserted us. But diseases, there's no let up.

I was not a good father in my first marriage. Although there are ways of deserting the family without leaving physically, I was deserted in my head. I was always out, always in the saloons, always drinking, always messing about.

Looking at the Obamas, it's like my father and my mother 43 years later. It was the same old rock star thing, and I think Barack is continuing what my father did with true consciousness, true ability, and a global view.

Michelle and Barack [Obama] epitomize what my father set the stage for - they epitomize global community organizing. I'm a global child, I was raised a global child, and he's a global child.

[My father] was not a racist, unlike what the white racist media would say. He had a global outlook just like Barack [Obama] and Michelle [Obama].

I look at Barack [Obama], he's slim like my father, and Michelle's [Obama] full figured like my mother. And I just love it.

We're Democrats [with my father]. So, of course he would [support me]. Absolutely.

My father wasn't a militant racist. He was a human rights activist - he was about human beings, so let's just get away from going way back then.

[Barack Obama] and Michelle, in my heart, this is my personal feeling, epitomize what my mother and my father were. They are community organizers on a global level.

My parents were kids when I was born. My mother was 16. My father was 17, and they got married in high school. And they split a few years later. When they split was when all that was happening also, and he - they were just coming into themselves. But they remained friends.

My father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it.

I had gone to - that was my second time going to the mosque. And then at that time we met [with my wife], she was Muslim and - but was at a point where - because her father is an imam and her mother, though, is a convert, but she was basically raised Muslim. And she was at that point where she was deciding or trying to come to terms with her own relationship with Islam and how to embrace that for herself. So I was sort of trying to come walk toward it.

What, however, left a deep impression on me was the reading of the Ramayana before my father. During part of his illness my father was in Porbandar. There every evening he used to listen to the Ramayana.

If God is not a personal being for me like my earthly father, He is infinitely more.

Compulsory obedience to a master is a state of slavery, willing obedience to one's father is the glory of son ship.

I was around when my father finished the last payment of his house. I remember like it was yesterday. He had worked all those years to own that house and he cried. He was so excited and so happy and I want to see other people get that feeling, too.

My father is my idol, so I always did everything like him. He used to work two jobs and still come home happy every night.

My father said once that if I didn't have my mother's ginger hair, I wouldn't blush or curse as easily. Which I though was unfair. I hardly ever curse or blush, even though I've had plenty of days that required both.

It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.