Quotes & Sayings About Life Without Father

I was an only child growing up, and my father passed away when I was twelve, so for most of my life, it was just me and my momma. We were really, really close. Learning to live in the world without her has been incredibly hard. At first, it didn't make any sense - how to do it, to live without her - but you slowly get somewhat used to it. — Annie Wersching

I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Women are not tools, strong women move mountain. Treat them with respect the way you would treat your president, father, daughter, son, sister or mom. Because without them humanity perish. — Henry Johnson Jr

Without Christ there is no access to the Father, but futile rambling; no truth, but hypocrisy; no life, but eternal death. — Martin Luther

O holy Jesus, Gentle friend, Morning Star, Midday sun adorned, Brilliant flame of righteousness, life everlasting and eternity, Fountain ever-new, ever-living, ever-lasting. . . . Son of the merciful Father, without mother in heaven, Son of the true Virgin Mary, without father on earth, True and loving Brother. — Kenneth McIntosh

Believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator, infinitely holy and loving, who has a plan for the world, a plan for my life, and some daily work for me to do. I believe in Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, as Example, Lord, and Saviour. I believe in the Holy Spirit who is able to guide my life so that I may know God's will; and I am prepared to allow him to guide and control my life. I believe in God's law that I should love the Lord my God with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my mind, and with all my strength; and my neighbour as myself. I believe it is God's will that the whole world should be without any barriers of race, colour, class, or anything else that breaks the spirit of fellowship. To believe means to believe with the mind and heart, to accept, and to act accordingly on that basis. — Eric Liddell

We were two halves to a whole. Water, the mother of creation. Land, the father who supported it. We were forever joined, our souls tethered. In this moment, the truth came to life: Whether the gate closed or not, I would never be whole without this man by my side. — Denise Grover Swank

Never talk about submission without talking about Jesus, and in particular of the cross. Jesus' version of submission is thoughtful, strong, purposeful, and sacrificial. It involves the full and determined embrace of his Father's will (which governs everything Jesus does)3 and the voluntary pouring out of his life to rescue a lost world.4 Submission is both. It is redemptive. It is the gospel. It is a way of showing Jesus to the world. — Carolyn Custis James

I despised myself for my weakness. I may have dreamed all my youth of life as a horse-trader like my father; I may have railed against my conscription and loathed the legions on principle, but even so, every morning in this place I cursed my lack of valour and every night, when I slept, my traitorous
mind brought me dreams drenched in the blood of our enemies as my comrades in the Vth launched themselves into battle, taking risks, winning glory, rising in the ranks, killing the enemy and so becoming men ... all without my being there.
The fact that it was winter, when the weather forced a kind of peace on both sides, and that my comrades were currently enduring endless forced marches over the mountains in western Armenia because their general had deemed them unfit for battle, did nothing to hamper my fantasies. — M.C. Scott

One of my young married students has suffered all her life because she was taught in her Church that she was born so sinful that the only way the wrath of God the Father could be appeased enough for him to forgive all her horrible sinfulness was for God the Son to die in agony on the cross. Without his suffering, the Father would remain angry forever with all his Creation.
Many of us have had a least part of that horror thrust on us at one time or other inour childhood. For many reasons I never went to Sunday School, so I was spared having a lot of peculiar teaching to unlearn. It's only lately that I've discovered that it was no less a person than St. Anselm who saw the atonement in terms of appeasement of an angry God, from which follows immediately the heresy that Jesus came to save us from God the Father. — Madeleine L'Engle

What's life without risk," my father said. "Nothing but mauvais foi [bad faith]" from The Society of S (p. 137). — Susan Hubbard

Q. What is your only comfort in life and death? A. That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, wherefore by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him — Zacharias Ursinus

A man must have a stout digestion to feed upon some men's theology; no sap, no sweetness, no life, but all stern accuracy, and fleshless definition. Proclaimed without tenderness, and argued without affection, the gospel from such men rather resembles a missile from a catapult than bread from a Father's hand. — Charles Spurgeon

My life has been like a battlefield, a war that could never be won unless I had her with me, and the day she died my battlefront stepped down and threw away their shields, allowing the gunshots to slip through the second her heart stopped beating. From that moment onwards I was left wounded, and for those seventeen years without her my wounds bled-wounds no stitch could ever repair. — Rebecah McManus

Not a day has gone by that I have not communicated with my Father in Heaven through prayer. It is a relationship I cherish-one I would literally be lost without. If you do not now have such a relationship with your Father in Heaven, I urge you to work toward that goal. As you do so, you will be entitled to His inspiration and guidance in your life. — Thomas S. Monson

I cannot imagine a life without books.
Without Father's stories of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, without pirate stories and fairy tales and poems. Without the hope of another way, of freedom and adventure beyond what we have here and now. How dark life would be. — Jessica Spotswood

Pray only thus: Our Father, without beginning and without end, like the heavens! May Thy being alone be holy. May power be Thine alone, so that Thy will may be done, without beginning and without end, on earth. Give me the food of life this present day. Efface my former mistakes and wipe them out, as I efface and wipe out all the mistakes my brothers have made; that I may not fall into temptation, but be saved from evil. For the power and strength are Thine, and the decision is Thine. — Leo Tolstoy

At my father's club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus-the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen...Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little....Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now. — Sheldon Vanauken

He glanced over at Luthar, sneering down into his bowl as though it was full of piss. No respect. He glanced over at Ferro, staring yellow knives at him through narrowed eyes. No trust. He shook his head sadly. Without trust and respect the group would fall apart in a fight like walls without mortar.
Still, Logen had won over tougher audiences, in his time. Threetrees, Tul Duru, Black Dow, Harding Grim, he'd fought each one in single combat, and beaten them all. Spared each man's life, and left him bound to follow. Each one had tried their best to kill him, and with good reasons too, but in the end Logen had earned their trust, and their respect, and their friendship even. Small gestures and a lot of time, that was how he'd done it. 'Patience is the chief of virtues,' his father used to say, and 'you won't cross the mountains in a day.' Time might be against them, but there was nothing to be gained by rushing. You have to be realistic about these things. — Joe Abercrombie

God calls us to a wild adventure, not a tea party, my dear. I don't follow Jesus because he can give me a life without pain. I follow him because he is good. Someday I will follow him right through death, and into our Heavenly Father's house.
Aunt Wealthy — Martha Finley

I has always thought the world was good, that everyone could find the beauty in themselves. Everyone could honor, and forgive, and live a full and gorgeous life, even when the hands they'd been dealt weren't easy.
But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was.
Her power was tremendous, working through her, but it had gone to rot, and without someone to help her and to love her, she did not know how to take it back. — Brenna Yovanoff

From early childhood, I had been told how smart I was, and throughout my life various people had tried so hard to teach me everything there was to know. But it occurred to me then how negligent they had been in teaching me how to love. I had two example of love in life - my mother's, absolute and over- burdened, the trial of love; and my father's, the cold and ambitious pursuit of meaning in love, the desire to turn it into a product with a worth that could be measured. Of the two options, I had skewed towards the former, disappointed with my father's method, and so I had bestowed a sort of unconditional love on Carly without really understanding what it meant. I wished that just one person had taught me a way to love her less. If I had loved her less, maybe I wouldn't have hated her so much. And maybe then I could have forgiven her. — Anna Jarzab

I have lived among negroes, all my life, and I am for this Government with slavery under the Constitution as it is. I am for the Government of my fathers with negroes. I am for it without negroes. Before I would see this Government destroyed I would send every negro back to Africa, disintegrated and blotted out of space — Andrew Johnson

Had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard - and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings - and he was not in the least addicted — Jane Austen

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can't touch a hair on my head without the will of God my Father, because He is on my side. — Diet Eman

My father never was and isn't a mean man. You know, he never was ruthless. And he succeeded in life without sticking it to anybody. And that's a great example for a man, a strong man, a man's man, to give to his children. You can succeed, you can be successful, without walking over somebody. — Maria Shriver

I must accept my Father's loving help in resisting and overcoming. Sin is like an octopus with many tentacles trying to crush out my life. Seldom do all tentacles loosen their hold on me at once. It is one tentacle at a time. In this war against sin, it is a victory won through one soldier dying at a time. Seldom does the entire enemy army fall dead at a single blast. It is hand-to-hand combat. It is one small victory at a time. But God doesn't send me out to do battle without a war plan. He is my Commander; I will fight - inch by inch, hour by hour - under His direction. He dispatches the Holy Spirit to me, with clear directions on how to fight, when to run, where to strike next. This battle against principalities and powers is His — David Wilkerson

What would they talk about?
Hi, my name's Vane and I howl at the moon late at night in the form of a wolf. I sleep with your daughter and don't think I could live without her. Mind if I have a beer? Oh and while we're at it, let me introduce my brothers. This one here is a deadly wolf known to kill for nothing more than looking at him cross-eyed, and the other one is comatose because some vampires sucked the life out of him after we'd both been sentenced to death by our jealous father.
Yeah, that would go over like a lead balloon. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The more basic reason is that the human being gets his original experiences of being a self out of his relatedness to other persons, and when he is alone, without other persons, he is afraid he will lose this experience of being a self. Man, the biosocial mammal, not only is dependent on other human beings such as his father and mother for his security during a long childhood; he likewise receives his consciousness of himself, which is the basis of his capacity to orient himself in life, from these early relationships. These important points we will discuss more thoroughly in a later chapter - here we wish only to point out that part of the feeling of loneliness is that man needs relations with other people in order to orient himself. — Rollo May

My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself. — John Cassavetes

You see?" The Father whispered as the boy passed without meeting their eyes. "You shouldn't feel ashamed of your problem. Your life experiences oftentimes is the same as someone else's. — Teresa Lo

In the days of Ram Mohan Roy when English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it ... They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities at the time of the Swadeshi movement. — Chittaranjan Das

What is the hope that can give meaning to life? Without some form of hope, the Holy Father argues that life becomes tedious and potentially burdersome, even if it is marked by material influence and technical progress. The person without hope finds himself in an existential difficulty: For what enduring purpose am I clinging to this life that I love and do not want to lose? — Raymond J. De Souza

You talked to me of being young," I said to Jake, "you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don't you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without the life of a boy. Being young means bondage to me, it means a gaping sepulcher of a house smelling of dust and decay, it means people I have never loved living apart from me in a world of their own where there's no time, it means the stifling personality of my father crushing the spirit of his son, it — Daphne Du Maurier

So if you don't like your life, change it. How would you change it? You decide. There's no action without first decision. Decision is the mother or the father of action, and action is what changes your life. — Tony Robbins

For me, life without murder is like a life without food. I was the father of these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world. — Alexander Pichushkin

Jesus Christ is the way of gaining a father, the path of a pure and righteous life without fornication, lust or adultery — Sunday Adelaja

Make no mistake,' He says, 'if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect - until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less. — C.S. Lewis

The time has been in Israel under the law of God, the celestial law, or that which pertains to the celestial law, for it is one of the laws of that kingdom where our Father dwells, that if a man was found guilty of adultery, he must have his blood shed, and that is near at hand. But now I say, in the name of the Lord, that if this people will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life — Brigham Young

'The image of you putting a condom on a banana to teach me about gay sex is forever ingrained in my head.'
'Well, a good father teaches his son about the facts of life.'
'You didn't have to put the banana in your mouth,' I reminded him.
He grinned without looking up. 'Bet that kept you from performing fellatio for quite a while.'
'Longer than you'll know.' — T.J. Klune

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction
who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did
without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! — Lionel Shriver

...why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this. — P. Harding

These wedding guests could have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful. His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not, Thou hast kept the good wine until now. — George MacDonald

The aim of education is to develop resources in the child that will contribute to his well-being as long as life endures; to develop power of self-mastery that he may never be a slave to indulgence or other weaknesses, to develop [strong] manhood, beautiful womanhood that in every child and every youth may be found at least the promise of a friend, a companion, one who later may be fit for husband or wife, an exemplary father or a loving intelligent mother, one who can face life with courage, meet disaster with fortitude, and face death without fear. — David O. McKay

You know, Ed,' the Father says, "They say their countless saints that have nothing to do with church and almost no knowledge of God, but they say that God walks with those people without them ever knowing it.' His eyes are inside me now followed by the words 'You're one of those people, Ed. It's an honor to know you.' I've been called many things in my life, but no one has told me it's an honor to know me. — Markus Zusak

I assume you are the sort of person who would go backstage after the opera in hopes of hearing the prima donna crying on the telephone, or walking in on the baritone fellating the basso buffo. I respect that-I was always the same way myself-though I suspect you are not very happy. Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions. I remember, even before this was visited upon me, how I envied those who eagerly did what they were told: those who married without complaint at father's behest; those who looked up rather than sideways in church; those, in short, who honestly believed in God, good kings, and righteous wars. — Christopher Buehlman

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty and ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look. — Eliot Pattison

You may be surprised to learn that, in our law, although the fetus is currently without the right to life, it does have some rights. For instance, under civil law, the unborn child has the right to inherit part of his father's estate should his father die before he is born, and he has the right to sue his Mother, or a doctor, for injuiries sustained while in the womb. — Janet E. Smith

My life is over.
My one forever love has
been snatched away,
condemned by my own
father's rules to die,
just because he loved me.

I am without a home,
without a single person to love.
And after having
discovered love, lived for a short
while surrounded by love,
that is to much to bear.

I am a pariah, at church,
at school. The few people
I once called friends have
betrayed me and caused
the death of my husband,
our innocent child.

And so they should die too.
All of them. Dad. Bishop
Crandall. Trevor, Becca, Emily.
With the pull of a 10mm hair
trigger, their lives will end at sacrament meeting.
Such lovely irony!

And when I finish there,
I'll hide in the desert,
reload, and go in search
of Carmen and Tiffany,
who started the rumors.
And Derek, just because. — Ellen Hopkins

Alice interrupted. No tears, no secrets. I want the life I'm meant to have, Etta. It's as simple as that. My father always says that the way to truly live is to do so without expectations or fear hanging over you, affecting your choices ... — Alexandra Bracken

Christmas means giving. The Father gave his Son, and the Son gave his life. Without giving there is no true Christmas, and without sacrifice there is no true worship. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Life is arduous without any breaks, like a long journey without any inns. Learned variety makes it pleasant. Spend the first part of a fine life in communication with the dead. We are born to know and to know ourselves, and books reliably turn us into people. Spend the second part with the living: see and examine all that's good in the world. Not everything can be found in one country; the universal Father has shared out his gifts and sometimes endows the ugliest with the most. Let the third stage be spent entirely with yourself: the ultimate happiness, to philosophize. — Baltasar Gracian

Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have
an important mission, that I'm temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one
big edge on me. His father's ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating
without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do
there, and why to do it. Don't worry, I don't hear voices. But there is this feeling that I have a
destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I
roam.
And I roam. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.
It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.
I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.
Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness — Dorothy Day

I have men in my life. I have a brother. So Maddox will have male teachers. I was raised without a father. — Angelina Jolie

Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules? — Elisabeth Elliot

If we had everything we wanted and needed without asking of Heavenly Father, we would lose sight of the hand of God in our lives. — Elaine A. Cannon

I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity ... On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved. — Susan Abulhawa

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. — Mavis Gallant

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon. The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgement. All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who live sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures. — Jack London

The greatest tragedy is a life lived and died without knowing Father God intimately and experiencing His love personally. — Bob Parr

I saw him as the supplier of my life. In a dream, in a hole, I saw the great snake of life, devouring its own tail. Life eats life, the image of the snake seemed to tell me. Life devours itself. You are part of this, and so is Gup. The snake is the whip in my father;s hand. The whip is in my hand and reaches from my bloodied back to whip my father's hand. The torturer and the tortured are each playing a part and cannot be without the other. — Douglas Clegg

My son was singing to us of our Father! Of Yeshua ... Of himself, the truest part of him, and of me, the me that was now risen and complete, joined in Yeshua's identity, like water in a bowl and the bowl in the water at once. He was the Way. The Truth. Life. No one could know the Father without this joining. And the song said more, all at once, like the opening of eyes to see an entire landscape once darkened by blindness. The mystery Talya sang to me in that single note could fill a hundred scrolls. I stood high in that arena and I trembled with wonder. TALYA — Ted Dekker

I am so proud of my father; he is the biggest example of success and courage I have ever seen in my life. He is the emperor of my kingdom. Of course, my father IS an emperor, his name is Asoka, the greatest emperor ruled in India. Moreover, as the name says, he is 'without sorrow' and the slayer of our sorrows. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well- read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
SO I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
-Kurt Vonnegut "A man without a country" p. 132 — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Here's the core problem we have with the Sermon on the Mount: it isn't that Jesus' teachings are absurd; it's that we don't see the world that Jesus sees. We see a world of injustice and anger and hatred and violence--a world where everything good is in short supply and life itself is fragile. But Jesus saw a world in which his father was in control, in which justice was guaranteed, in which goodness was breaking forth, and in which life itself is without end. And if you see that world through the lens of the gospel, then what Jesus tells us to do and how he informs us to live makes perfect sense. — Skye Jethani

From my father I heard only these words: "But you were born for such a day as this." He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can't speak of without crying all over again. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn't go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after and live a happy life without them. Thoughts — Hugh Howey

As I took Allison to the airport for her flight into San Francisco and the rest of her life, I thought about how lucky her father and I were to have had her in our lives. My time with her was over, though I was sure we would stay in touch. I kept thinking I should be sad, but I felt content more than anything. Now, I'm not saying I won't want to call her every day, and she'll probably die without me, but why ruin something so perfect trying to stay together? — Rob Thomas

And the things which conduce in any way to the commodity of life, and of which fortune gives an abundant supply, he [my father] used without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. — Marcus Aurelius

Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing; the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers, which at each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of darkness and strange lust. Very true, he replied. And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed age who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without the sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated. Very — Plato

When we got to the Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue - again Win's full name is Windsor Horne Lockwood III, so you do the math - Dad said, "You want me to just drop you off?" Sometimes my father leaves me awestruck. Fatherhood is about balance, but how can one man do it so well, so effortlessly? Throughout my life he pushed me to excel without ever crossing the line. He reveled in my accomplishments yet never made them seem to be all that important. He loved without condition, yet he still made me want to please him. He knew, like now, when to be there, and when it was time to back off. "I'll be okay." He — Harlan Coben

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Addiction" might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society. Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in "the distant country," leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled. In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home. The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in "a distant country." It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

All my life, I have judged my worth by how much I have been loved by a man. It's so with a lot of women, that their self-esteem is measured by how much they are loved by a man, their partner, their boyfriend or maybe their husband. In my case, it may be because I grew up without my father. — Katrina Kaif

Had I been too selfish? I had never known my mother, but I knew my life as it had been without her: the ship, the sea, the myths, the maps . . . and, yes, Kashmir. The pain I felt at the thought of losing him - the same pain that kept me at arm's length - gave me a hint of my father's own struggle. — Heidi Heilig

Scarlett was not fond of fate. She liked to believe if she were good, good things would happen. Fate left her feeling powerless, and hopeless, and with an overall feeling of lessness. To her, fate seemed like a larger, omnipotent version of her father, stealing her choices and controlling her life without any regard for her feelings. Fate meant that nothing she did mattered. — Stephanie Garber

In Greek the word for covenant is also the word for testament. Every proper covenant eventually becomes a testament. Before the person who enacted the covenant dies, it is the covenant. After he dies, that covenant becomes a testament. A testament in today's terms is a will ... We have a will full of hundreds of bequests. My heavenly Father has given me all these bequests, and they have been covenanted to me as a testament. That is the new testament. We have the New Testament of the Bible in our hands, but this is not the reality. The reality of all the hundreds of bequests in the New Testament is Christ. Without Christ, the Bible is empty, so the real testament, the real will, is Christ. Christ is our title deed, and this title deed is in our spirit as the all-inclusive, life-giving, indwelling, consummated Spirit. — Witness Lee

Every member of our Church is a missionary. Without the formality of a setting-apart we should be so set-apart from the ways of the world that we can teach the gospel, which is our Father's way of life, by the very lives we live. — William J. Critchlow Jr.

As a child of God, how much more do we need times of complete solitude - times to deal with the spiritual realities of life and to be alone with God the Father. If there was ever anyone who could dispense with special times of solitude and fellowship, it was our Lord. Yet even He could not maintain His full strength and power for His work and His fellowship with the Father without His quiet time. God desires that every servant of His would understand and perform this blessed practice, that His church would know how to train its children to recognize this high and holy privilege, and that every believer would realize the importance of making time for God alone. — Lettie B. Cowman

Our physical body knows it cannot function without physical water. So, too, our spiritual life should realize that it can't function without the "living water" of Gods Word. — Jim George

What I really want to say is who the hell are you and who are you to decide who gets to die. Who are you to decide who should be killed. Who are you tell me which father I should destroy and which child I should orphan and which mother should be left without her son, which brother should be left without a sister, which grandmother should spend the rest of her life crying in the early hours of the morning because they body of her grandchild was buried in the ground before her own. — Tahereh Mafi

I have led an unusual life. I have buried a father killed at age 50 and two brothers killed in the prime of their lives. I raised my children as a single mother when my husband was arrested and held for eight years without a conviction - a hostage to my political career. — Benazir Bhutto

A later church father, Tertullian, wrote concerning Rome, "Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish."3 The — John F. MacArthur Jr.

What I will add as an perfect example of a man who is passionate of his work, without wife, everything giving, no information about his life like mother, father or something like this... I will give as an example NightClawer.
People often understand under this name some kind a horror, but unfortunately it's about a reporter and it's not horror. I will call it passion! — Deyth Banger

Standing out there in th dark, I felt many different things. One of them was pride in my fellow Americans, ordinary people who rose to the moment, knowing it was their last. One was humility, for I was alive and untouched by the horrors of that day, free to continue my happy life as a husband and father and writer. In the lonely blackness, I could almost taste the finiteness of life and thus it's preciousness. We take it for granted, but it is fragile, precarious, uncertain able to cease at any instant without notice. I was reminded of what should be obvious but too often is not, that each today, each hour and minute, is worth cherishing. — John Grogan

These people, they were different to anyone I'd met. They'd offered their friendship, their trust, without a second thought. I'd always been wary about new people in my life. That same old barrier I put up to protect myself. I didn't let anyone close enough to be able to hurt me. My father had left, as though I was as insubstantial as air. As a child, I'd struggled to come to terms with it. He'd been there every single day, and then he wasn't. So what were we to him? A stopgap until something he determined as better came along? With the Aunt Margot feud, and subsequent alienation of the family, it felt as though people abandoned us like we were yesterday's newspaper. Could I fall into friendships with these girls, and then leave? Maybe it was time for me to stop worrying about anything other than living in the moment. I was missing out on so much, standing on the edge of life, waiting for something that might never happen. — Rebecca Raisin

I'm so exhausted with worry, I go to bed early that day. But hours later, I'm still awake. I can't seem to fall asleep. Not without him by my side. When did I become so addicted to Jake? Why do I crave his company? Since forever, my conscience responds. After my father's death, I went off the deep end because he was not there. I sought the BDSM lifestyle, not because I yearned for it, but because I wanted the pain. If Jake had been there, somehow I could have muddled through the aftermath of my father's funeral without looking for someone to tie me up and administer punishment. I wanted to be beaten as an outlet for my agony. Not that it made any difference. Even after I flew to Brazil, the pain was still there. It still is. And I know why. Because he's not by my side. As much as I want him to be here with me, he never signed on to babysit me for life. — Magda Alexander

As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections- sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent- that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone. — Alice Sebold

I want someone to need me, to depend on me. The arsehole, the bastard who's left a long string of whores broken in his wake without so much as a second thought. The piece-of-shit whose life was almost snuffed out by his father, who wakes every day and looks in the mirror with enough self-loathing to detonate Times Square, if only that shit was combustible. That pathetic excuse for a man wants to be worthy of someone. The question I need to figure out now is: why? — Carmen Jenner

It's natural for children to drift through their early childhood taking their parents for granted, then adolescence rears its ugly head and insouciance morphs into rebellion as they strive to define themselves by being as different from those who gave them life as possible. But for me, now on the eve of my sixteenth year, familial insurrection had yet to seize me - and in reality, it never would. I was my father's son. His moral compass was inexorably mine. I knew that day I would forever define myself not by contrasts to my father, but by emulation, striving to be a "good man" like him. But the term "good man" was not adequate to describe him. Daddy was a great man who charted his own course in life, guided by his own light, irrespective of the opinions of others, be they my grandmother's or those of his Brothers in the Lodge. He was the kind of man I wanted to be, the kind of man I was already becoming without fully realizing it. — G.M. Frazier

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed. — John Irving

Despair of ever being saved, "except thou be born again," or of seeing God "without holiness," or of having part in Christ except thou "love him above father, mother, or thy own life." This kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven. — Richard Baxter

In my entire life growing up I've never heard my dad say an unkind word about anyone. My father has always taken the high road in life and to me he's a complete inspiration without being a pushover. — Hugh Panaro

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her
separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans. — Jennifer Egan

His brothers accepted his fluid nature as something Darian simply was. He had been so all his life; suspended between male and female, one rising, the other ebbing without pattern or reason. The Queen, daughterless and doting, had gladly let her youngest son
wear gowns, bows, and curls far longer than appropriate, until his father had intervened with violent persuasion. At court, he now moved as a man. In private, he never stopped wearing gowns or ribbons when the softer she inside him waxed like the full moon. He allowed her complete rein. In truth, he no longer knew where he ended and she began. They were the same. — E.M. Hamill

All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won't exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines's honey complexion, Brigida's death, Iris Mateluna's hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza's father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa's La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce's prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up. — Jose Donoso

Philosophy goes into the problem deeply, without changing being at all. Religion tells me that I have been created; that I am continuously receiving myself from divine hands, that I am free yet living from God's strength. Try to feel your way into this truth, and your whole attitude towards life will change. You will see yourself in an entirely new perspective. What once seemed self-understood becomes questionable. Where once you were indifferent, you become reverent; where self-confident, you learn to know "fear and trembling." But where formerly you felt abandoned, you will now feel secure, living as a child of the Creator-Father, and the knowledge that this is precisely what you are will alter the very tap-root of your being — Romano Guardini

The feeling of emptiness is usually a sign that we have put our trust in something that can't sustain us. It reminds us that we were created to trust in our heavenly Father and nothing else. We were created to enjoy the many things God gives without making them the center of our lives. When we confuse the two, our lives feel out of kilter. To feel better, we try again and search for love apart from God, but when we finally realize that it is elusive, we forsake the quest and quietly despair. Keep probing. Life is ultimately about God. — Edward T. Welch