Paternal Love Quotes

“...if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children's homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.”
― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version

“I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I cannot imagine how much I must’ve suffered in my previous lives to be fortunate enough to have parents like you in this life.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“Christaki welled up as their father hugged his daughter. He looked away, not wanting to intrude on this private moment, a rare demonstration of paternal love.”
― Soulla Christodoulou, The Summer Will Come

“It is now clear that faith is a singular pledge of paternal love, treasured up for the sons whom he has adopted.”
― John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 Vols

“We don't live our lives alone, but that doesn't mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When Dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temper and his eyes, in a way he disappeared from my life, in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of discomfort I occasionally felt when he called or when something reminded me of him, then a kind of zone within me was activated, and in that zone lay all my feelings for him, but he was not there.

Later, in his notebooks, I read about the Christmas when he called from the Canary Islands and the weeks that followed. Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn't only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 4