If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.
In the summer of 1952, when I was 30, the Army assigned me to an infantry unit fighting in Korea. Meanwhile, though, there was other news in my family: My father had become the Republican presidential nominee. As an ambitious young major, I refused any offers for other assignments.
In the evening of the first day my father conducted us to the public baths.
I want to thank my mother and my father for teaching me to have a dream. You are seeing my dream come true.
My father wasn't around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, 'Why me? Why don't I have a father? Why isn't he around? Why did he leave my mother?' But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, 'I don't know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?'
My parents separated when I was nine, but my father was always around, and he still follows me now. He is always sending me messages.
My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.
I definitely do want a family. The idea of being a father and providing the type of love, guidance and support that my parents have given me is definitely down the road.
I love it when people come up to me and they say a line. Like, you know, 'My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'
My mother was a great inspiration to me to always do my best. My father has always been my mentor and friend. They taught me the basic principle that guides most all that I do: faith, focus, finish.
This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father.
My mother went to a school called 'The Club of the Three Wise Monkeys'. And my grandmother, my father's mother, had a gold charm for her made with the speak no, see no, hear no evil monkeys. And I was fascinated by that charm. I'd sit in my mother's lap and play with it all the time.
My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.
While the Assads are despotic, George H.W. Bush made the father an ally in Desert Storm, and Ehud Barak offered to return to Hafez Assad the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace deal.
In 'Love Story,' Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can't resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she's diagnosed with cancer and they can't afford the costly treatments.
The kid who throws his spaghetti from the high chair onto his father's face, he's pushing back. He's sticking it to the man as he sees it. I like that. So that is punk.
I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there.
My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.
I've said it before, but it's absolutely true: My mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.
I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'
I grew up not really having a father figure, and it didn't bother me, because he wasn't there in the first place. But then he started other families, and I was jealous. It was like he was happy without our family.
There have always been men of all background and ethnicities on my father's job sites. And long before it was commonplace, you also saw women.
Skin cancer became personal to my family when my father was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma.
I have lots of memories of my father. He was an incredible father. We all loved him to death. He'd try to educate us as much as he could and was always looking out for us. He was very protective.
True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it.
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
My father's politics and ideas were, to me, unforgivable. He was a Jewish convert who became very anti-Semitic, and I didn't find the anti-Semitism forgivable.
My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.
I was the youngest of nine siblings... I lost my father when I was just 13. For me, the elders have been my gods.
I have a dream of re-creating the fantastic family I grew up in with my brother and my parents. I am lucky that I have such a good image of family life - my father and mother are still in love, still happy.
The best way for women to acquire knowledge is from conversation with a father, a brother, or a friend, in the way of family intercourse and easy conversation, and by such a course of reading as they may recommend.
A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.
My father was always Labour, and my mother was always Conservative, so I tended to sort of go in the middle.
I think about my father and how sad it was that he never had grandchildren.
Now, I had been drawing all this time - especially in France of course - so, when I came back, my father gave me the chance to do a cover for one of the books he published.
