orphan

While many of us give to the hungry orphan, we have forgotten to love her.

When other girls were dreaming about love, she dreamt of love too, but in an entirely different context - the ones they took for granted.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a __oom lens effect,_ in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

When you don't have something anymore, you learn to live without it." That's what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom's clothes. All the different smells of her were still there and the memories were alive even if she wasn't. I looked up into his face and wondered why would I ever want to learn to live without her? That felt like she really would be gone forever, and I wanted to limp on the broken piece of me so I could feel her there all the time.

Never go on a date unarmed._ Words of wisdom from my father. Well, my foster father. I was an orphan, of course. The best kings always are.

I really want to believe that when our Quiet Waters kids wake up in the middle of the night, scared, they__l remember being in their bunks with John and Kate and Whit and me right there protecting them,_ he said. __ hope we gave them that sense of belonging because I know there__l be times in their lives when grasping at those bonds could mean the difference between making it and not.

For my sake,_ he said firmly, addressing the air in front of him as though it were a tribunal, __ dinna want ye to bear another child. I wouldna risk your loss, Sassenach,_ he said, his voice suddenly husky. __ot for a dozen bairns. I__e daughters and sons, nieces and nephews, grandchildren__eans enough.__e looked at me directly then, and spoke softly.__ut I__e no life but you, Claire.__e swallowed audibly, and went on, eyes fixed on mine.__ did think, though . . . if ye do want another child . . . perhaps I could still give ye one.

Weeping Widows"There is a river that cuts ThroughThe heart of EveAnd flows throughParadise's back window.It streams into A bottomless wellThat rolls down to hellWith the tears of theWeeping widows.The women stand along the well,And cryWhile singing gray lullabiesAs orphaned childrenLight up candles to put on palm leavesTo push into the streamWith petals of jasmine And pieces of tangerine,Then sit back and wait for their fatherTo show up over the horizon Where his heart still beatsIn their dreams.

History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?

Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn__ want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus__ words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard.

There would be fewer absent fathers, if straight men were turned on only by women with whom they would not mind having children.

Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor.

It__ a neighborhood where every dad has at least one job and where parents often end conversations with the words: no guts, no glory.