Jsaa

“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

“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

“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

“Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.”
― Georgia Douglas Johnson