Authors:

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.15, Canongate Books
my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile? and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever