Firsts Quotes (page 163)
Teaching, therefore, asks first of all the creation of a space where students and teachers can enter into a fearless communication with each other and allow their respective life experiences to be their primary and most valuable source of growth and maturation. It asks for a mutual trust in which those who teach and those who want to learn can become present to each other, not as opponents, but as those who share in the same struggle and search for the same truth.
Henri Nouwen
I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing. And the first motion, all the interimis. Like a phantasm, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments. Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffer then. The nature of an insurrection.
William Shakespeare
But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorce-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.
Milan Kundera
The little prince went away, to look again at all the roses. "You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have...
Nick Hornby