“I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.”

“If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it,' I told him. He heard me but he did not speak. I wanted to say more to him, but I knew that it would have been useless. Though older than I, he had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

“More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. I lost my father as a little girl, and I want to be able to find him again in my heritage.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

“My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

“I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.”

Richard Ford (1944) American novelist and short story writer

“In [the story of Jesus] I found … a center for my being. Behind the supernatural framework of the first century, behind the language of myth, magic, and superstition, I discovered a life I wanted to know; a life that possessed a power I wanted to possess; a freedom, a wholeness for which I had yearned for years.”

John Shelby Spong (1931) American bishop

“I didn’t want to cry in front of you.”
He wiped away the tears with the pad of his thumb.
“I want you to cryin front of me.”

Robyn Carr American writer

“I want more than anything for my children to be happy, and I love them because they are sad, and the erratic project of kneading that sadness into joy is the engine of my life as a father, as a son, as a friend—and as a writer.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

“I stare at her for a long moment. I want to kiss her. I want to kiss her more than I've ever wanted anything in my life.”

Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants