First Paragraph

I was what the world would term a failure until I was forty-two years old. I did not regard myself as a failure; I learned from every mistake as best I could. My wife, Toshiko, once told me that what others call failure is merely a stepping-stone. I am now eighty-four years old: I look back on my life and see that everything that happened to me in its first half was somehow part of the preparation for what I would do with its second half. As Shakespeare reminds us, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

- From Captured By History: One Man's Vision of Our Tumultuous Century by John Toland