Freyja

“Funny, that! You planted a tree; you watched it grow; you picked the fruit and, when you were old, you sat in the shade of it. Then you died and they forgot all about you—just as though you had never been....But the tree went on growing, and everybody took it for granted. It always had been there and it always would be there....Everybody ought to plant a tree, sometime or another—if only to keep them humble in the sight of the Lord.”
― Reginald Arkell, Old Herbaceous: A Story

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“ふりかえって見ると、さっきの十字架はすっかり小さくなってしまい、ほんとうにもうそのまま胸にもつるされそうになり、さっきの女の子や青年たちがその前の白い渚にまだひざまずいているのか、それともどこか方角もわからないその天上へ行ったのか、ぼんやりして見分けられませんでした。
　ジョバンニは、ああ、と深く息しました。
「カムパネルラ、また僕たち二人きりになったねえ、どこまでもどこまでもいっしょに行こう。僕はもう、あのさそりのように、ほんとうにみんなの幸のためならば僕のからだなんか百ぺん灼いてもかまわない」
「うん。僕だってそうだ」カムパネルラの眼にはきれいな涙がうかんでいました。
「けれどもほんとうのさいわいはいったいなんだろう」
　ジョバンニが言いいました。
「僕ぼくわからない」カムパネルラがぼんやり言いました。”
― 宮沢 賢治, 銀河鉄道の夜

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History