A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
Interpretation
The first love holds a unique emotional significance, while subsequent relationships may blend together in memory.
This quote by H. L. Mencken reflects the idea that a person's first experience of love is cherished and remembered with a distinct warmth and affection. As one experiences more relationships over time, those subsequent loves tend to lose some individuality in memory, becoming generalized rather than distinct, indicating a natural human tendency to romanticize the first love while potentially diminishing the impact of later romances.
In practice
During a speech about the significance of first experiences in relationships.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.
I tore off my mask so as not to lose one of her tears... and she did not run away!...and she did not die!... She remained alive, weeping over me, weeping with me. We cried together! I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer.
A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
I love you. I love you, but Iβm turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
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