Najada Zylyftari

“You never will derive so much delight from seeing a glorious little woman in the arms of a third party, as you would have felt if you had seen Dot run into the Carrier’s embrace.  It was the most complete, unmitigated, soul-fraught little piece of earnestness that ever you beheld in all your days.”
― Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth

“I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“He was often near to something or other very clever, by his own account: this lumbering, slow, honest John; this John so heavy, but so light of spirit; so rough upon the surface, but so gentle at the core; so dull without, so quick within; so stolid, but so good!  Oh Mother Nature, give thy children the true poetry of heart that hid itself in this poor Carrier’s breast”
― Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth

“And all was Caleb’s doing; all the doing of her simple father!  But he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means.  For all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not in the unseen world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth address themselves to human kind.”
― Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth