Father Absent Quotes & Sayings

EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up - through distance, differences, divorce, or death. — Mitch Albom

My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Because my father was often absent on naval duty, my mother suffered me to do much as I pleased. — John James Audubon

You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. — Mitch Albom

My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes. — Maira Kalman

your mother
is in the habit of
offering more love
than you can carry


your father is absent


you are a war
the border between two countries
the collateral damage
the paradox that joins the two
but also splits them apart — Rupi Kaur

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching. — Robert Bly

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein - hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings - is etched indelibly on our minds. "A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all," writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years. — Michio Kaku

This father always relates to his children in perfect love. This father is never absent. He is never disinterested. He is never preoccupied. He is never unable to respond to a need. — Henry T. Blackaby

I've only ever chosen men who happen to spend a lot of time out of the country, who have jobs that take them all over the world, and I think that's interesting because my father was absent, and then home, and I've always been in relationships where there's separation. — Patsy Kensit

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living. — Elizabeth Janeway

Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity. — Frank Pittman

If there's no relationship with a father who's absent, nobody talks about it. — Charles B. Rangel

When a man is physically present but emotionally absent, a girl's heart can feel quite hollow and helpless. This is true whether that man is her father, her husband, or even a man whom she deeply respects. — Lysa TerKeurst

Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. — Zadie Smith

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time. — Jodi Picoult

It's become a habit to make films where the father is absent. My father impresses me, but the father figure does not. — Xavier Dolan

The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father's will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur. — Edward O. Sisson

Of course it is fine to highlight any group that you feel is important. But it's becoming impossible to define that group as "oppressed," because now every group claims to be oppressed, and none admit they are oppressors. White males used to be the bad guys, but now even they have caught the fever. White males are no longer a single group that can be blamed for oppression, because most of them now claim to belong to an oppressed or marginalized group themselves: they are drug addicts, physically handicapped, alcoholics, were sexually abused as a child, victims of an absent father, abducted by aliens, or turned into "success objects" by women. They can't oppress anybody because they are too busy being oppressed themselves. Besides, — Ken Wilber

My dad was a good man but an emotionally absent father, and so I had to look for that male attention somewhere else, and found it in a brother-in-law. He just happened to be an alcoholic. — Jim Hamilton

The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy -- that he looked like a 'wop'. Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in, — Barrack Obama

Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely. — Michael Gurian

What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can't come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn't a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in. — Tayari Jones

My father was absent and he was a hero to me. — Greta Scacchi

Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. — Jeff Greenfield

McEwan's Atonement ... truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past ... . The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel ... . There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes - the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression - into his narrative, and in a magical love scene. — Noah Richler