My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” my dad would reply, “we’re raising boys.”

—Harmon Killebrew

It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.       —Gloria Steinem

He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could. He was the only one in the house who wasn’t afraid to into the basement by himself. He cut himself shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it. It was understood when it rained, he got the car and brought it around to the door. When anyone was sick, he went out to get the prescription filled. He took lots of pictures ... but he was never in them.                                                                                              

                                                                                        —Erma Bombeck

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love the most is soap-on-a-rope.         —Bill Cosby

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.           — Enid Bagnold

A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma. — Marlene Dietrich

A father is a banker provided by nature.               —French Proverb

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

My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.          —Clarence Budington Kelland

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. —Mario Cuomo

The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat, like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle it took such months to get.

—Phyllis McGinley

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. —Mario Cuomo

Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.             —Ruth E. Renkel