Paternity Quotes

“And if this child shares a fraction of your smile or a fragment of your mind, look out, world! That would be enough.”
― Lin Manuel Miranda, Hamillton

“I never really grew up until I had kids.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“And the game of dominoes is much like life: You gotta play the bones you’ve pulled. It don’t matter if you got seven doubles in your damn hand.”
― S.B. Redd, Presumption of Paternity

“Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay

“...in the best society hardly anyone can be certain who their father is.”
― Winston Graham, Bella Poldark

“However precise the results offered by paternity testers, the truth was recognized by societies that flourished long before they appeared: that fatherhood means more than genes alone.”
― Steve Jones, Y: The Descent of Men

“The biggest lie ever told by a man to his woman is that his child with another woman is not his. The biggest lie ever told by a woman to her man is that her child with another man is his.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Pastor McFucking Bride this . . . Pastor McFucking Bride that. Fuck him!”
― S.B. Redd, Presumption of Paternity

“Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“He stared at me as if I'd claimed paternity of his children.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Some women wish the pregnancy tests also told them who the fathers are.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“It was not till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success...the first thrill of creation...the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity...indeed, many soured bachelors would wager that it must be almost as wonderful to see the first tiny crinkled leaves of one's first plant as to see the tiny crinkled face of one's first child.”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“C’était aussi pour cette raison que j’avais adoré devenir père. Avoir un enfant est un antidote à cette nostalgie et à cette fraîcheur fanée. Avoir un enfant vous oblige à vous délester d’un passé trop lourd, seule condition pour vous projeter vers demain. Avoir un enfant signifie que son avenir devient plus important que votre passé. Avoir un enfant, c’est être certain que le passé ne triomphera plus jamais sur l’avenir.”
― Guillaume Musso, La fille de Brooklyn

“Fathers are essentially different from mothers because we were all once in our mother's bodies, are born out of those bodies, and as infants take food from them. Paternity is more distant and less direct than maternity; it's a claim we accept as children, one inscribed in our legitimate, that is, legal, names.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“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

“For not taking care of his own child, a man can, with reason, argue that he made, not the child, but love.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The book that he wanted was in an area that seemed barren and deserted from the rest of the library, like a friend who had been alienated for committing a social faux pas such as pronouncing French words with the English “x” and “s” sound, not the “faux pas” referring to the loser in a paternity test battle.”
― J.S. Mason, The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights

“Bravo, Amir. You're a good son.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner: Graphic Novel

“Again and again, we see how cultures and religions frame women’s sexuality as both powerful and dangerous, and as something that must be kept under control.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“…the male desire to control women’s sexual activity can be traced to efforts to ensure paternity. This impulse lurks behind even the most extreme or bizarre expressions of religious obsession, misogyny, and sexual repression.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“«La paternità, a meno che uno non sia un folle o un mentecatto, risveglia ciò che di più terribile alberga nell’uomo: il senso di responsabilità! Io sento che dovrò rimettere a mio figlio il mandato perenne dell’umanità. A meditare sul mistero della paternità c’è da diventare pazzi. E se la maggior parte dei padri non diventano pazzi è solo perché sono stupidi… oppure perché non sono padri. Rallegrati, quindi, Augusto, perché forse questa fuga ti ha risparmiato la fatica di essere padre. E io ti ho detto sempre di sposarti, ma non di diventare padre. Il matrimonio è un esperimento… psicologico; la paternità, invece, è un esperimento… patologico».”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla