Kelly

“A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. “You have told me heaven is very beautiful,” he said. “Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.” In the reprieve at the end of a day, in the stillness of a summer evening, the world sheds its categories, the insistence of its future, and is suspended solely in the lilt of its desire.”
― Barry López, Arctic Dreams

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. I: 1920-1925

“Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that's about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility