"My dad taught me at a very young age that I should work harder than everyone else: Be the first one in and the last one out."

“As kids, there's somehow the fear that these bullies can end your life if they want to. Everything is blown up, and occasionally that kind of awful thing does happen.”

“Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us.”

“Churches and trains they all look the same to me now they shoot you some place while we ache to come home somehow.”

“The fastest way to heal a broken heart is to find someone better to love, and love more. Know that sometimes heartbreak happens just to push you to God.”

“The prime objective of all Initiatory music in the Temples of Antiquity was to bring about physical purification and renewal, mental stimulation and alertness, spiritual exhilaration and Illumination.”

“No man goes before his time - unless the boss leaves early.”

“I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.”

“To find by experience that friendships are mortal, is the hard but inevitable lot of fallible and imperfect men.”

Source : Samuel Parr, John Johnstone (1828). “The Works of Samuel Parr ...: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, and a Selection from His Correspondence”, p.514