"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
~Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi," Atlantic Monthly, 1874
"It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
"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, The Bonfire of the Vanities
"Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again."
~Jimmy Piersal, on how to diaper a baby, 1968
"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan."
~ Garrison Keillor
"A man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season".
~ Unknown
"Small boy's definition of Father's Day: It's just like Mother's Day only you don't spend so much." ~ Unknown
"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."
~Charles Wadsworth