Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.

"Do you think you should help him?"
"Yes," he said, "I thought we were going to."
"How?" I asked.
"By taking him fishing with us."
"I've just told you," I said, "he doesn't like to fish."
"Maybe so," my brother replied. "But maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him."

O how I envied him his feelings!

He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.

A occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me.

For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that i ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.

This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.

By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.

He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)

In being a loving son, I suppose I was trying to become a loved son.