Dorothy Allison Quotes

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

My heart belongs to daddy.

Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.

My father had put these things on the table. I looked at him standing by the sink. He was washing his hands, splashing water on his face. My mamma left us. My brother, too. And now my feckless, reckless uncle had as well. My pa stayed, though. My pa always stayed. I looked at him. And saw the sweat stains on his shirt. And his big, scarred hands. And his dirty, weary face. I remembered how, lying in my bed a few nights before, I had looked forward to showing him my uncle's money. To telling him I was leaving. And I was so ashamed.

Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.

A child's cry touches a father's heart.

contrary to what many believed, my father was kind and tenderhearted, especially towards his family. His forbidding sternness seemed to melt into love, kindness, and easy familiarity when he was with us. Especially with me, his acknowledged successor to the throne, he would play lightheartedly. When we were alone together, he would sing me little songs; I don't remember his ever doing this in front of others, but when only the two of us were there, he would often sing to me.

I had nothing to fear from my father. Except his disappointment. Which was no small thing.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.

I put everything I had into it - all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking.

For Dad, the perfect Father's Day would be one in which he didn't even realize that it was Father's Day, because nobody was making him appreciate gifts he didn't want, or read greeting cards filled with lame Father's Day poetry.

I'm not thinking about forcing my kids to watch my movies. It's always awkward when someone says: "Hey, I wrote a song, can I play it for you?" That would be the dynamic, if I was like: "Hey, you're my son, watch my work!" I don't want to put them in that awkward position. Just because when they get older, that's when I'm worried, that they'll judge me and say: "Yeah, my father's ******* Jack Black. He was in that cheesy movie." So, I'm going to keep it all high quality. It'll be a quality controller.

I mean, her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was the suffering wife of a man who she could never predict what he would do, where he would be, who he would be. And it's sort of interesting because Eleanor Roosevelt never writes about her mother's agony. She only writes about her father's agony. But her whole life is dedicated to making it better for people in the kind of need and pain and anguish that her mother was in.

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.

My dad was a complicated man. He was a huge racist, my dad, but he still tried to be a good father, you know? Like, he would tell me that Santa Claus was black - that way, when I found out he didn't exist, it wouldn't be that big a let down.

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

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.

it was all your genes that made us geniuses, mom. said peter. we sure didn't get any from dad. i heard that. father said, not looking up from the news that was being displayed on the table while he ate it would've been wasted if you hadn't

My parents loved me, and I think they realized that I was probably not going to have a normal 9-to-5 job. For the longest time, my dad thought that I was just going to be home until I was, like, 35, which, weirdly, is completely normal in Asian families.

I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?