Letter To The Father Quotes & Sayings

I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone. — Karen Thompson Walker

After more than one hundred and fifty years of living alone in the darkness, I met you, Susannah, and through you, I met Father Dominic. Everything my mother said in her letter came true. It wasn't the same church, and it wasn't the same priest. But the letter and the ring were there, all because of you. And now I want to give that ring to you. — Meg Cabot

Epigraphs from Ballroom Dancing: An Erotic Romance of Dominance and Submission

"He's like my father in a way - loves the chase and is bored with the conquest - and once married, needs proof he's still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you."
- Jacqueline Bouvier, July, 1952, making an observation about her future husband in a letter to her priest "Father L," the Reverend Joseph Leonard of Dublin, Ireland.

"Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, Mr. President..."
- Norma Jeane Mortenson, May 19, 1962, Madison Square Garden, New York City. — Anna Andreesen

Letter 17


Morning. The snow was falling outside. There was a white silence.
My mother and I sat facing my father at the dining room table.

There was something impenetrable about his gaze. It was like pack ice.

And the ice was thickening.

I could barely see into him.

I knew.
And they knew that I knew.

He was broken.

I did not even need to look at him.

I could feel his brokenness all thorough the room. — Gregory Colbert

[1965]
To my children
Dear Hildita, Aleidita, Camilo, Celia, And Ernesto,
If you ever have to read this letter, it will be because I am no longer with you. You practically will not remember me, and the smaller ones will not remember me at all.
Your father has been a man who acted on his beliefs and has certainly been loyal to his convictions.
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature. Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone is worth nothing.
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.
Until forever, my children. I still hope to see you.
A great big kiss and a big hug from,
Papa — Ernesto Che Guevara

Came to deeply regret giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on that vote. He later asserted that the resolution gave him the sole authority to decide when the clock had run out on weapons inspections. On March 20, 2003, he decided that it had, and he launched the war, with the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to finish the job. Over the years that followed, many Senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them. As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake became more painful. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. — Siri Hustvedt

The next morning, as she was going downstairs, she was met by her father, who came out of his library with a letter in his hand. "Lizzy," said he, "I was going to look for you; come into my room." She followed him thither; and her curiosity to know what he had to tell her was heightened by the supposition of its being in some manner connected — Jane Austen

Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind. — B.C. Forbes

Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?' Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation. He reddened, and said, 'I don't know, sir.' 'Think, sir, think,' said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly ... 'Never, mind. Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.' For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them. 'Hoares,' he repeated absently once or twice, 'my bankers are Hoares,' and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success. — Patrick O'Brian

Here - and in the letter as a whole - we again find the classic NT eschatology. Having chosen a people for his own possession, God the Father has sent forth his Son to live and to die for them, thereby providing a just basis for their redemption (2:14, 3:12). In fulfillment of his eternal purpose (1:16), he has also raised Christ from the dead, received him into heaven, and seated him at his own right hand, where he will henceforth serve as cosmic Head, not only over the Church (1:18), but also over all rule and authority, whether human or angelic (2:10). In short, God has made the Lord Jesus to be High King of Heaven and Earth. — Dean Davis

I lost the letter in rather embarrassing circumstances. We were to dine at Parramatta Government House that same evening, and Peter had come in early from harvesting the wheat, sitting down in all his dirt to read the precious missive. I sat beside him, fresh from my bath. And so handsome did my husband look, long legs sprawled in Dungaree trousers and frowning over my father's spiky hand, that I could not resist reaching out to smooth away the frown. He caught my hand to his lips, still reading, and then chancing to look up, and reading my face more swiftly than he would ever read the written word, pulled me onto his lap. — Jennifer Paynter

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, "My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too." I imagined Phil's mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil's food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father's late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn't help, it would just make the checks even later. "It's a vicious circus," Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation - the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling - might help, he said, "I'm virtuously certain it wouldn't," looking martyred and older than his years. — Laura Kasischke

It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever taught Stannis how to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The storm came up suddenly, howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord's two-masted galley Windproud broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets his two eldest sons had watched as their father's ship was smashed against the rocks and swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went down with Lord Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days thereafter every tide left a fresh crop of swollen corpses on the strand below Storm's End. — George R R Martin

I wrote a letter to you when I was in the capital. So stupid, to put it all in writing. Every thing I'd done. The information I passed to Tensen. The way I worked against the empire. What I felt. My father read it. He gave it to the emperor." She was weeping. "And I know, I know that it hurt him, that I broke something, that he felt it break. Maybe I wasn't me anymore, to him. Do you understand? Not his daughter. Not anyone he knew. Just a lying stranger. But how could he? Why couldn't he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn't he love me enough to choose me over his rules? — Marie Rutkoski

She could feel the sweat forming between her palm and the envelope she was carrying and worried that by the time she reached home, the letter would need to be rung out before she could show her father. — Jill Maguire

If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons, to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians; and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are able to find among them no such act of adoption; we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.
['Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law?', letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, from Monticello, February 10, 1814] — Thomas Jefferson

She says it is a school for bluestockings which, according to her, is really only a fashionable way of saying it is a school for ugly girls who cannot find suitable husbands. To tease her, for I believe it is one of his greatest pleasures in this life, my father bought a pair of blue silk stockings for me the day we received my letter of acceptance. That evening and the next, father and I dined alone. — Gwenn Wright

Father, R.I.P., Sums Me Up at Twenty-Three
She has no head for politics,
craves good jewelry, trusts too readily,
marries too early. Then
one by one she sends away her friends
and stands apart, smug sapphire,
her answer to everything a slender
zero, a silent shrug
and every day
still hears me say she'll never be pretty.
Instead she reads novels, instead her belt
matches her shoes. She is master
of the condolence letter, and knows
how to please a man with her mouth:
Good. Nose too large, eyes too closely set,
hair not glorious blonde, not her mother's red,
nor the glossy black her younger sister has,
the little raven I loved best. — Deborah Garrison

Desmond ushered the man inside. He was stooped and ugly, with an unkempt beard and unwashed clothes, yet Father greeted him pleasantly and asked his name.
"Yoren, as it please m'lord. My pardons for the hour." He bowed to Arya. "And this must be your son. He has your look."
"I'm a girl," Arya said, exasperated. If the old man was down from the Wall, he must have come by way of Winterfell. "Do you know my brothers?" she asked excitedly. "Robb and Bran are at Winterfell, and Jon's on the Wall. Jon Snow, he's in the Night's Watch too, you must know him, he has a direwolf, a white one with red eyes. Is Jon a ranger yet? I'm Arya Stark." The old man in his smelly black clothes was looking at her oddly, but Arya could not seem to stop talking. "When you ride back to the Wall, would you bring Jon a letter if I wrote one?" She wished Jon were here right now. He'd believe her about the dungeons and the fat man with the forked beard and the wizard in the steel cap. — George R R Martin

Take the case of prostitutes, a group more or less available every night. As a young man, Proust had been a compulsive masturbator, so compulsive that his father had urged him to go to a brothel, to take his mind off what the nineteenth century considered to be a highly dangerous pastime. In a candid letter to his grandfather, sixteen-year-old Marcel described how the visit had gone: I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2nd in this same excitement, I wasn't able to have sex. So now I'm back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and for 3 more francs for that pot. — Alain De Botton

I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it."
"Or," said Roshar, "your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there's a dead body."
"If so," Arin said, "then we're no worse off than we were before."
"Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter's a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He'll ignore the main road. He'll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn't have the advantage of height. You know this."
Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.
Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. "Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this? — Marie Rutkoski

Dear Stanley, It was wonderful to hear from you Your letter made me feel like one of the other moms who can afford to send their kids to summer camp. I know it's not the same, but I am very proud of you for trying to make the best of a bad situation. Who knows? Maybe something good will come of this. Your father thinks he is real close to a breakthrough on his sneaker project. I hope so. The landlord is threatening to evict us because of the odor. I feel sorry for the little old lady who lived in a shoe. It must have smelled awful! — Louis Sachar

Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past. Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after. — Jorge Luis Borges

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...

{Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823} — Thomas Jefferson

I kept trying to find a way to turn myself so that I couldn't see the telephone poles or be in the path of father's breath. I was feeling dizzy and then very sick and the father was shouting, 'WHAT THE
GO TO THE HEAD, DO IT IN THE HEAD! DON'T PUKE ON ME, CLYDE! CLYDE!'
I never did finish my letter to Jesus. I tried for a while but I couldn't think of anything else to say besides, Have a Good Summer and Stay Crazy. — Lynda Barry

Peasants seldom write letters, and for my father the arrival of a letter was an important ceremony that entailed quite a ritual: the glass of wine for the postman, the close scrutiny of his name on the envelope - mistakes can happen, and you must never open a letter that isn't addressed to you - and then the blade of the knife carefully inserted to liberate whatever the fates had in store. — Maurice Messegue

Several years later, I received a letter from a young Englishman. He said that his father had died in the race, he knew not how or why. He had come across "Fastnet, Force 10" in a library and now he understood. Now, he wrote, it was time for him to sail his own Fastnet and finish the race that his father had completed. I sympathized; I was on a journey of my own as a student in divinity school. Yet I worried that he might be a little reckless out there, and suggested that there are other ways to honor the dead. I never again heard from him, but I do believe that - as in the Cornish tale about the water calling, "The hour is come, but not the man" - he joined the line of landsmen inevitably rushing down the hills to the sea. — John Rousmaniere

The picture is supposed to go up just inside the front door, so it's the first thing you see when you come in. It's green. It's about the size of a barn door. It has one vertical orange stripe, and it's called 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony.' Mother wrote a letter to the paper, saying the picture was an insult to the memory of Father, and to the memory of every serious artist who ever lived. — Kurt Vonnegut

How much of her life had she spent waiting? Waiting for a plant to sprout? Waiting for her father's judgment? Waiting for another letter
to appear in the knothole from Kai? Waiting for years after Kai left to feel at peace with her decision? She fed the Reduced, she did her chores, she avoided her father and her sister, and she waited.She did the duties she'd been taught as a Luddite, and she lied with every breath. — Diana Peterfreund

Early Morning in Your Room
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water
It seems you've traveled years to get here.
Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.
Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter
to his Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling
With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That's what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home. — Robert Bly

I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it ... And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God's very attention itself, personalized ... This is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine, i.e. angelic. — J.R.R. Tolkien

steps, deep in thought. A breeze was slightly disturbing his hair. Then, as we watched, he walked very slowly up the steps. At the top, he turned and came back down, a little faster. Turning once more, my father became still again for several seconds, contemplating the steps before him. Eventually, he climbed them a second time, very deliberately. This time he continued on across the grass until he had almost reached the summerhouse, then turned and came walking slowly back, his eyes never leaving the ground. In fact, I can describe his manner at that moment no better than the way Miss Kenton puts it in her letter; it was indeed 'as though he hoped to find some precious jewel he had dropped there'. — Kazuo Ishiguro

If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus' way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence. — Pope Benedict XVI

Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his son's teacher, translated into Pashto. It is a very beautiful letter, full of good advice. "Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books ... But also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside," it says. "Teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat. — Malala Yousafzai

Inej nodded. "I gave your letter to the guard at the door, and it did the trick. They brought me directly to two members of the Triumvirate."
"Who did you meet with?" said Kaz.
"Genya Safin and Zoya Nazyalensky."
Wylan sat forward. "The Tailor? She's at the embassy?"
Kaz raised a brow. "What an interesting fact to forget to mention, Nina."
"It wasn't relevant at the time."
"Of course it's relevant!" Wylan said angrily.
Jesper was a little surprised. Wylan hadn't seemed to mind wearing Kuwei's features at first. He'd almost seemed to welcome the distance it gave him from his father. But that had been before they'd gone to Saint Hilde. And before Jesper had kissed Kuwei. — Leigh Bardugo

It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked. — Tad Williams

In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. — Cormac McCarthy

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.
I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
You want a letter from me? she asked.
I told her yes.
Oh, God bless you, she said.
The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film. — Russell Baker

There was a nodding of heads in the kitchen, and only Tom sat rocklike and brooding.
"Tom, wouldn't you be willing to take over the ranch?" George asked.
"Oh, that's nothing," said Tom. "It's no trouble to run the ranch because the ranch doesn't run
never has."
"Then why don't you agree?"
"I'd find a reluctance to insult my father," Tom said. "He'd know."
"But where's the harm in suggesting it?"
Tom rubbed his ears until he forced the blood out of them and for a moment they were white. "I don't forbid you," he said. "But I can't do it."
George said, "We could write it in a letter - a kind of invitation, full of jokes. And when he got tired of one of us, why, he could go to another. There's years of visiting among the lot of us." And that was how they left it. — John Steinbeck

I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations
a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up at sometimes. I don't drink anymore but my alcoholic head occasionally says different. 'Nil By Mouth' was a love letter to my father because I needed to resolve some issues in order to be able to forgive him. — Gary Oldman

She remembered her letter confessing every thing to Arin. I am the Moth. I am your country's spy, she'd written. I have wanted to tell you this for so long. She'd scrawled the emperor's secret plans. It didn't matter that this was treason. It didn't matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor's son on First-summer's day, or that her father was the emperor's most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she'd been born Valorian. She'd written what she felt. I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you. — Marie Rutkoski

BEN-HUR." Esther returned the letter to her father, while a choking sensation gathered in her throat. There was not a word in the missive for her
not even in the salutation had she a share
and it would have been so easy to have written "and to thine, peace." For the first time — Lew Wallace

When the bomb doors are open and you're flying straight and steady over battery upon battery of radar guided guns with ten thousand pounds of explosives and two thousand gallons of high octane petrol exposed under your seat it feels like you're dangling a piece of raw red meat to a great white shark. That's how he once described the bomb run in a letter to his father. — Glenn Haybittle

Darling,
You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
Your father — Jonathan Safran Foer

Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned. — Franz Kafka

She heard her father's voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. 'Be wakeful and watchful,' she heard Henry say. 'Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I see by your letter to my father that you are rather afraid the French may invade England. — William John Wills

You go on, I presume, with your latin Exercises: and I wish to hear of your beginning upon Sallust who is one of the most polished and perfect of the Roman Historians, every Period of whom, and I had almost said every Syllable and every Letter is worth Studying.
In Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, you will learn Wisdom and Virtue. You will see them represented, with all the Charms which Language and Imagination can exhibit, and Vice and Folly painted in all their Deformity and Horror.
You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen. - This will ever be the Sum total of the Advice of your affectionate Father,
John Adams — John Adams

Jeff is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who plays a lot of obscure two-letter words that shouldn't count but for whatever reason are considered legitimate. My father is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who takes hours with his turn and then plays deliberately misspelled words that no one has the heart to call him out on. I am the perfect Scrabble player, both serious and considerate. Obviously I lost by a lot. — Bennett Madison

To celebrate his prosperity, fellow employees and friends urged him to take a young concubine to "serve him". Even Ye Ye's boss, the London-educated K. C. Li, jokingly volunteered to "give" him a couple of girls with his bonus. Ye Ye reported all this in a matter-of-fact way in a letter to his wife, adding touchingly that he was a "one-woman man". — Adeline Yen Mah