"My wife - to-be and I went to see my father. Only he could answer the two questions before us: Shall we get married now? Shall I begin the practice of law, or continue being the successful wine salesman I had become, working my way through law school?"
"Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time"
"I have a 92 year old father whose doing beautifully who lives in Chicago and a sister and a nephew and a niece and I love coming back and try to do so fairly often"
"Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is right there... she's in town because her father was at Johnson Smith College... and she was delivering a speech there"
"In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night"
"And so I put down some of the things that he said, about keeping your tools sharpened and not letting them lie on the ground where they get hurt or get abused and dirty and can't find them. And some thoughts about how his father used to do things"
"My father worked hard, but we were still very poor; and I didn't want anybody arguing about money, so I became the entertainer - the one who wanted everyone to be happy. I didn't want there to be any problems"
"Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn't distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father"
"My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son"
"My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners"
"I was sent to a school because my father was already aware that his days were numbered, and he was anxious for me to acquire a good education and follow in his footsteps"
"She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister"
"I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them"
"One of the things that made me persist in the Antarctic in the face of sickening discouragements was my determination to name a portion of the earth's surface after my father"
"If I did not have for him the warm affection a son feels toward a less austere and preoccupied father, I at least had an immense respect for him, and a great admiration"
"When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco"
"My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school"
"I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare"
"On October 28th, 1887, I became the mother of a girl baby, the very image of its father, at least that is what he said, but who has the temper of its mother"
"Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants"
