Jsaa

“The whelp went home, and went to bed.  If he had had any sense of what he had done that night, and had been less of a whelp and more of a brother, he might have turned short on the road, might have gone down to the ill-smelling river that was dyed black, might have gone to bed in it for good and all, and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy waters.”
― Dickens Charles, Hard Times

“For the first twenty years, since yesterday,
I scarce believed thou could'st be gone away;
For forty more, I fed on favors past,
And forty' on hopes, that thou would'st they might last.
Tears drowned one hundred, and sighs blew out two;
A thousand, I did neither think, nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or, in a thousand more, forget that too.
Yet call not this, long life, but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?”
― John Donne, John Donne: Selected Poems

“He Is Not Dead

I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead. He is just away.
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land
And left us dreaming how very fair
It needs must be, since he lingers there.
And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn
For an old-time step, and the glad return,
Think of him faring on, as dear
In the love of There as the love of Here.
Think of him still as the same. I say,
He is not dead—he is just away.”
― James Whitcomb Riley

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death