Happy First Fathers Day Quotes

Dad, wherever you are, you are gone but you will never be forgotten. ~ Conrad Hall

I don't know what I'm doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm. ~ Woody Allen

There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence. ~ Samuel Johnson

The second request of the very pure soul is to see the coming of the Father's kingdom (cf. Mt. 6:10). What this means first of all is that each day Christ should reign among holy men. And this happens when the devil's power has been driven out of our hearts through the expulsion of sinful foulness and when God has begun to reign within us amid the good odors of virtue. With fornication vanquished, chastity rules; with anger overcome, peace is king; with pride under foot, humility is sovereign. ~ John Cassian

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness. ~ Saul Bellow

She remembers her name. She remembers the name of the president. She remembers the name of the president's dog. She remembers what city she lives in. And on which street. And in which house. The one with the big olive tree where the road takes a turn. She remembers what year it is. She remembers the season. She remembers the day on which you were born. She remembers the daughter who was born before you – She had your father's nose, that was the first thing I noticed about her – but she does not remember that daughter's name. She remembers the name of the man she did not marry – Frank – and she keeps his letters in a drawer by her bed. She remembers that you once had a husband, but she refuses to remember your ex-husband's name. That man, she calls him.

She does not remember how she got the bruises on her arms or going for a walk with you earlier this morning. She does not remember bending over, during that walk, and plucking a flower from a neighbour's front yard and slipping it into her hair. Maybe your father will kiss me now. She does not remember what she ate for dinner last night, or when she last took her medicine. She does not remember to drink enough water. She does not remember to comb her hair.

She remembers the rows of dried persimmons that once hung from the eaves of her mother's house in Berkeley. They were the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers that your father loves peaches. She remembers that every Sunday morning, at ten, he ta ~ Julie Otsuka

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic punniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh.

A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when hi little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. AS he hold shi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thougths, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for thi time to remian intimately wi ~ Brennan Manning

And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life. ~ Manu Joseph

The adhan," the father explained. "God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." he looked up at me and smiled. "In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer."
It seemed absolutely fitting, give the miracle that every baby is.
The differences between the Muslim father's request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.
Between love and hate. ~ Jodi Picoult

On his deathbed, my grandpa told me three things to remember for after he died. First he said, "You can't own a cat. Ever." Second he told me, "Friendly boys make friendly friends." Finally he said, "You were adopted, just like your father before you, and his father before him." "So," I said, "you were adopted?" "Of course not!" he replied. "Your father's not my son, just like he's not your father." And to this day I am still confused. I have no idea why I can't own a cat. ~ Jarod Kintz

In a private room down the hall, a tired but delighted Cecily was watching her husband with his brand-new son. Cecily had thought that the expression on Tate's face at their wedding would never be duplicated. But when they placed the tiny little boy in his father's gowned arms in the delivery room, and he saw his child for the first time, the look on his face was indescribable. Tears welled in his eyes. He'd taken the tiny little fist in his big, dark hand and smoothed over the perfect little fingers and then the tiny little face, seeking resemblances.
"Generations of our families," he said softly, "all there, in that face." He'd looked down at his wife with unashamedly wet eyes. "In our son's face."
She wiped her own tears away with a corner of the sheet and coaxed Tate's head down so that she could do the same for him where they were, temporarily, by themselves.
Now she was cleaned up, like their baby, and drowsy as she lay on clean white sheets and watched her husband get acquainted with his firstborn. "Isn't he beautiful?" he murmured, still awed by the child. "Next time, we have to have a little girl," he said with a tender smile, "so that she can look like you."
Her heart felt near to bursting as she stared up at that beloved face, above the equally beloved face of their firstborn.
"My heart is happy when I see you," she whispered in Lakota.
He chuckled, having momentarily forgotten that he'd taught her how to say it. "Mine is equally happy ~ Diana Palmer

It is very important that children learn from their fathers and mothers how to love one another- not in the school, not from the teacher, but from you. It is very important that you share with your children the joy of that smile. There will be misunderstandings; every family has its cross, its suffering. Always be the first to forgive with a smile. Be cheerful, be happy. ~ Mother Teresa

Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father's own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy's solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don't know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?

Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you've thrown already?

Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.

His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?

Of course they've gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father's apparent ignorance. They're stones. They're heavier than water.

And heavier than fishes?

Of course heavier than fishes.

Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won't have to work so hard.

Fat ~ David Marusek

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. ~ Jack London

the Battle of San Juan. Two years later, the regiment held its first reunion, with a grand three-day celebration at Oklahoma City. The young metropolis would show the world that it could do things. There would be visitors from every state. "T. R.," national hero, would attend. A grand display of fireworks, the largest ever seen west of the Mississippi, was ordered. Quanah was besought to bring a troop of Indians for the parade. They would be fed and cared for, paid a small sum, and could see the show. The agent agreed, and there was no difficulty in assembling a troop. The young men gathered their gayest finery and borrowed the carefully saved costumes of their fathers, war bonnets, belts, and beads and feather ornaments. ~ U.C. Berkeley

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us
whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp. ~ Julie Otsuka

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.
It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.
We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.
She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love. ~ Emily Ruskovich

The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20)

The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth's rebellion now twisted around his brow…

"On your back with you!" One raises a mallet to sink the spike. But the soldier's heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner's wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier's life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior's continued existence. The man swings.

As the man swings, the Son recalls how he and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. "Up you go!" They lift the cross. God is on display in his underwear and can scarcely breathe.

But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father's eye turns brown with rot.

His Father! He must face his Father like this!

From heave ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

Here is what I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the house early in the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the chill. I find the driveway, my father's car, the walls, the trees, the rooftops, and the hills buried under a foot of snow. I smile. The sky is seamless and blue, the snow so white my eyes burn. I shovel a handful of the fresh snow into my mouth, listen to the muffled stillness broken only by the cawing of crows. I walk down the front steps, barefoot, and call for Hassan to come out and see. ~ Khaled Hosseini

One day, I found my dad's dressing-gown in an old suitcase, and it transported me back to when I was five and thought he was a god or a superhero who could do anything. After that, I wrote my first positive book about fathers, about my dad. ~ Anthony Browne

With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only hea ~ William Faulkner

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: "[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor." He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: "When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture."
Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of "colonization," or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, "Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled."
In 1801 he looked forward to the day "when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. ~ Jared Taylor

I do find it odd," she went on, "that you should care how Mr. Pinter feels about me. I thought all you wanted was to have some man marry me. He would be as good as any."
Gran winced. "Not if he is after your fortune. That is what happened to your mother, and I regret to this day that I did not see beneath your father's winning smiles and title to his mercenary motive."
Celia swallowed past the lump in her throat. "Well, since Mr. Pinter has no title and barely knows how to smile, you needn't worry. If he has a mercenary motive, he's hiding it well." She surreptitiously kicked her tucker under the table as she stepped forward. "Now, let's go have some tea, shall we?"
After another hard look about the room, Gran took the arm Celia offered and let her grandmother accompany her out the door. But while they walked down the corridor, Celia's mind kept stumbling over Gran's revelation.
A rich wife of rank would enhance his chances.
It wouldn't be the first time a man had pretended to find her fetching for his own reasons. But if Gran's suspicions about Jackson's motives proved true, it would definitely be the last. Because Celia would rather enter a loveless marriage with the Duke of Lyons than be used by Jackson Pinter. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day. ~ Shirley Jackson

The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe. Rude machinery, propelled by water power, had been invested sails to propel ships upon the waters and been set to catch the passing breeze – but the application of steam to propel vessels against both wind and current, and machinery to do all manner of work had not been thought of. The instantaneous transmission of messages around the world by means of electricity would probably that day have been attribute to witchcraft or a league with the Devil. Immaterial circumstances had changed as greatly as material ones. We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated. The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

Love isn't a competition. It's not about coming in first or second or last. It's not about how much they love you back or making sure that they love you the most. When you truly love someone, you care more about their happiness than your own. If your mom finds someone else that she can love and who will love her back and make her happy, then I will be glad. Love isn't about coming in first place, Gemma. Love is about putting someone else first in front of yourself. ~ Natalie Palmer

There are people who say, 'Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father's name.' Indeed. But the point is simply this: whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I travelled my life's milestones, the name I have answered to since the first day I went to kindergarten in Nsukka on a hazy morning and my teacher said, 'Answer "present" if you hear your name. Number one: Adichie!'. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's like an addiction, one I battle every day. It appeared at first drink. I was becoming the very thing I feared---my father's son. I wanted to be as far away from that Threshold as possible. I swore I'd never take another sip, no matter how crazy it made me. No matter how much it called to me. Resisting became easier with time. ~ Sara Ella

Having a kid is like falling in love for the first time when you're 12, but every day. ~ Mike Myers

And it came to pass that in the hour of defeat Aragorn came up from the sea and unfurled the standard of Arwen in the battle of the fields of Pelennor, and in that day he was first hailed as king. And at last when all was done he entered into the inheritance of his fathers and received the crown of Gondor and the Sceptre of Arnor; and at midsummer in the year of the Fall of Sauron he took the hand of Arwen Undomiel, and they were wedded in the city of the kings. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

But this part of my dream, the most lovely of all, I can find no words to describe; nor can I even recall to my own mind the half of what I felt. I only know that something was given me then, some spiritual apprehension, to be again withdrawn, but to be given to us all, I believe, some day, out of his infinite love, and withdrawn no more. Every heart that had ever ached, or longed, or wandered, I knew was there, folded warm and soft, safe and glad. And it seemed in my dream that to know this was the crown of all my bliss - yes, even more than to be myself in my Father's arms. Awake, the thought of multitude had always oppressed my mind; it did not then. From the comfort and joy it gave me to see them there, I seemed then first to know how my own heart had ached for them. ~ George MacDonald

There comes a day in every man's life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.
Because of my father's circumstances, I had a sad commentary on life, but I now understood that he was offering me his own gift, one that only time can provide. He was offering me the gift of perspective. My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history---Armstrong's walk on the moon, Nixon's resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake---we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars, but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver's license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children.
And the cycle begins anew.
We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary. ~ Robert Dugoni

Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again. ~ Jimmy Piersall

Fathers are always so proud the first time they see their sons in uniform," she said.
"I know Big John Karpinski was," I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would amount to something.
But then Little John came home in a body bag. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

THE PILGRIM MOTHERS AND FATHERS Provincetown's first settlers were, in fact, the Pilgrims, who sailed the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor in 1620. They spent the winter there but, finding too little fresh water, sailed that spring to Plymouth, which has gone into the history books as the Pilgrims' initial point of disembarkation. Provincetown is, understandably, not happy about this misrepresentation of the facts. ~ Michael Cunningham

I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.
Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, ~ J.M. Barrie

If you have no arms

To hold your crying child but your own arms

And no legs but your own to run the stairs one more time

To fetch what was forgotten

I bow to you

If you have no vehicle

To tote your wee one but the wheels that you drive

And no one else to worry, "Is my baby okay?"

When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycare

or on that cursed first day of school

I bow to you

If you have no skill but your own skill

To replenish an ever-emptying bank account

And no answers but your own to

Satisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks again

I bow to you

If you have no tongue to tell the truth

To keep your beloved on the path without a precipice

And no wisdom to impart

Except the wisdom that you've acquired

I bow to you

If the second chair is empty

Across the desk from a scornful, judging authority waiting

For your child's father to appear

And you straighten your spine where you sit

And manage to smile and say, "No one else is coming - I'm it."

Oh, I bow to you

If your head aches when the spotlight finally shines

on your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaud

I bow to you

If your heart aches because you ~ Toni Sorenson

The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy. ~ Pascal Bruckner

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars. ~ Victor Hugo

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world's strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as "Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and journalist," and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father's engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor - commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman. Now, ~ Stephen Kotkin

Nu and Tina were not happy. The terrors that we tasted every day were theirs. [...] We imagined the dark corners, the feelings repressed but always close to exploding. And to those shadowy mouths, the caverns that opened beyond them under the buildings, we attributed everything that frightened us in the light of day. [...] Lila knew that I had that fear, my doll talked about it out loud. And so, on the day we exchanged our dolls for the first time, with no discussion, only looks and gestures, as soon as she had Tina, she pushed her through the grate and let her fall into the darkness. ~ Elena Ferrante

Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one. ~ H.L. Mencken

When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred ... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages. ~ Paul Engle

I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the 'demon' that the nervous, demagogic communique of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the 'reactionary' that L'Unita wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Toure. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second, and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn't happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organises a coup.

And the cycle begins anew. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski