fathers-and-daughters

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it__radually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.

I couldn't make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he'd probably consider his 'real life,' the one he deserved rather than the one he got.

Why shouldn't Mom trust me, Dad" Why are you so determined to make me out to be the bad guy all the time?" I stared at the side of his face, willing him to make eye contact. He didn't. "I've been doing really good late and you don't even care.""Yet you still managed to get into trouble tonight," he said."You have no idea what happened tonight," I said, my voice ratcheting up a notch. "All you know is that, because I was involved, I'm somehow guilty of something. You could at least pretend to care, you know. You could at least try to understand."Dad gave a sardonic little laugh. "I'll tell you what I understand," he said. "I understand that when you're left to your own devices you get into trouble, that's what I understand. I understand I was trying to have a happy, restful evening with Briley and once again you screwed it up.

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter__ face when she blushed.

We are born with our father's names. We are not responsible for their failures. We are responsible for what they made us believe in. That is our only obligation. And it is even then a choice which we may sometimes be wise to ignore.

It was during those years that I discovered that loving [my father] was like sticking a blade into my own heart. It got me nowhere, except awake in the middle of the night, recalling the years when my father was the strongest, the smartest, the funniest, and I lay curled in my bed, wondering why I had been cheated out of a father who loved me, and one I could love in return.

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.

These two Joes__he nasty bully and the starry-eyed dreamer__ere my father. Growing up, the difficulty was knowing just which Joe would rise with the sun that day.

She__l find you. Her need to know you will eventually consume her.

There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

He was a loving father, but he did his loving in private. Quietly, he would tell his daughter to drive safely. On her wedding day, when he walked her down the aisle, he'd whisper the words to her. But today, above the noise, he would have to shout it.

Henri held herself as if only her arms could keep her pieced together, and I saw that behind all her fake control__hrowing herself at a teacher, carving our dad out of her heart__as something fragile. I wish we__ seen it sooner__y dad and Mr. Flynn, they had a responsibility to see it, to do better. Those moments were my sister spinning out._

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice _ only later did she realise it was that thing he__ been concealing _ known as guilt.

If you can't do what you really want to do, then do the next best thing!

He knocked politely and entered the principal__ office with his dad face in full effect. He put his hand on my shoulder in a way that came off as both stern and proud. He was dad-ing it up for the principal, which I was actually a little grateful for, but it also made me mad.

I'm an old man now. Old on the inside. I'm a drunk, and I hate to tell you, but I'm not prepared to change. So you have to figure out if you want to forgive me and love me like I am, or run away again. Or hell, stay here and hate me. Just...know that I love you the best way I know how. I always have. I do the best I can.

He is a demon, Clarissa,_ said Valentine, still in the same soft voice. __ demon with a man__ face. I know how deceptive such monsters can be. Remember, I spared him once myse

We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reacyhed out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.