April Fools Day Sayings Quotes

hard to do. So, we are going to celebrate. You see, when you all wrote those nature poems the other day, you had all been secretly entered in”—he puts his arms up and raises his voice—“the first annual Fantastico Poetry Award.” Oh, great. Another thing for Shay to brag about. I look over at Albert and hope he will win instead. He’s hoping so, too. I can tell by how he pulls his chair in more, like he’s getting ready. I think that Suki has a good shot as well. “So,” Mr. Daniels begins, “this poem is a splendid surprise. Great work. And I am very happy to give the first annual Fantastico Poetry Award to . . .” I watch Shay out of the corner of my eye. If she wins, we’ll never hear the end of it. What she does doesn’t make sense. She shows surprise, but it’s followed by disgust. Mr. Daniels’s hand on my shoulder makes me jump. “Congratulations, Ally,” Mr. Daniels says. This can’t be. It’s too early for April Fool’s Day. I look over at Albert and Keisha, wondering if they put a poem in with my name. Mr.

A fool’s errand . . . but so is chipping at a blank concrete wall for twenty-seven years. And when you’re no longer the man who can get it for you and just an old bag-boy, it’s nice to have a hobby to take your mind off your new life. My hobby was looking for Andy’s rock. So I’d hitchhike to Buxton and walk the roads. I’d listen to the birds, to the spring runoff in the culverts, examine the bottles the retreating snows had revealed—all useless non-returnables, I am sorry to say; the world seems to have gotten awfully spendthrift since I went into the slam—and look for hayfields. Most of them could be eliminated right off. No rock walls. Others had rock walls, but my compass told me they were facing the wrong direction. I walked these wrong ones anyway. It was a comfortable thing to be doing, and on those outings I really felt free, at peace. An old dog walked with me one Saturday. And one day I saw a winter-skinny deer. Then came April 23rd, a day I’ll not forget even if I live another fifty-eight years.

You know, a government should be a good thing. The Anglo-Saxons and the Germans rejoice in the phenomenon of government. They think that the recipe for human happiness is that you should make your desires and actions concordant with those of the government. So a German and an American will try to make the government work for him, protect him, and he will be more than happy to murder to preserve that wonderful symbiosis. And if he has some money to invest, he will invest it in the government, buying government bonds. He does this regardless of whether his government happens to be trillions of dollars in debt—that is, practically bankrupt. Despite his rhetoric of private enterprise, a Westerner will invest in his government. And we, Eastern and Central Europeans, and particularly Slavs, we all consider our governments to be absolutely the worst in the world. We are ashamed of our governments, and, as a rule, our government is ashamed of us, trying to improve us statistically, to say that we work more and drink less than we do. We think that there's no greater obstacle to human happiness than the government. So even if we have an institution pregnant with democratic potential, such as workers' self-management, we never even bother to attend a meeting unless absolutely forced. And as for voting, we circle any name without looking at whose it is, out of spite. To a Slav, there is nothing more disgusting than voting. We have an aversion to investing trust in any human being. So how could we single out someone we haven't met but whom we know a priori to be a social upstart and climber? So we spend these workers' self-management meetings, where democracy could be practiced, in daydreams of sex and violence.

Don't fool April; she always finds an escape. Drained empty, but she still loves herself. Helping someone who is not too strong and taking the right turn in a place that appears to be wrong. Head spins faster than the days; she never forgets herself. Whistling a lullaby in the air, she says goodbye before dropping dead. The floor becomes a crimson pool, wearing shades of cool and telling the world; she's April, who you cannot fool.

The first thing you have to remember is that we count the days a bit differently. Having 39.6 more minutes each day, and 669 days—or sols, as we call ’em—in a sidereal period, meant that aresians threw out both Greenwich Mean Time and the Gregorian calendar in a.d. 2032, long before the Pax Astra took control of the near-space colonies, way before Mars declared its independence. The Zubrin calendar has twelve months, ranging from 48 to 66 sols in length, each named after a Zodiac constellation; it retroactively began on January 1, 1961, which became Gemini 1, m.y. 1 by local reckoning. The conversion factors from Gregorian to Zubrin calendars are fairly complex, so don’t ask for an explanation here; best to say that one of the first things newcomers from Earth have to realize is that April Fool pranks are even less funny at Arsia Station than they were back in Indiana.

Under the Sun" The days are my consolation. I take one home each night and put it in the case beside my bed and watch it fade in the dark, no matter how shiny it seems at first, no matter how high it stands behind the glass. I keep a few polished for memory's sake, but even they grow tarnished and lost among the others. "Thank you," I say to the dusk each night for another trophy engraved with the cloud code of that particular day—April l0, June 19 ... As for the diamond- studded chalice I glimpsed in a dream, I no longer want it, although I live as if I do to fool myself, throwing quarters at a wall, playing the numbers, singing, "Grief is happy with a stone. See how bright it shines on the dull cold ground.