Laura

“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Everything had changed suddenly--the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute--life or truth or beauty--of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago