Anna

“You can't ever rule again, back in the world," said Nanny. "There's too much music. There's too much iron."
"Iron rusts."
"Not the iron in the head."
The King snorted.
"Nevertheless...even that...one day..."
"One day." Nanny nodded. "Yes. I'll drink to that. One day. Who knows? One day. Everyone needs 'one day.'' But it ain't today. D'you see? So you come on out and balance things up. Otherwise, this is what I'll do. I'll get 'em to dig into the Long Man with iron shovels, y'see, and they'll say, why, it's just an old earthworks, and pensioned-off wizards and priests with nothin' better to do will pick over the heaps and write dull old books about burial traditions and suchlike, and that'll be another iron nail in your coffin. And I'd be a little bit sorry about that, 'cos you know I've always had a soft spot for you. But I've got kiddies, y'see, and they don't hide under the stairs because they're frit of the thunder, and they don't put milk out for the elves, and they don't hurry home because of the night, and before we go back to them dark old ways I'll see you nailed.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
― Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling

“The funeral service was held near her cabin, a week after Christmas, and was conducted by a missionary who said, “Last week the world did honor to a long-ago event that changed its history—the coming of the Lord to earth. We see at our feet here a parable of that magnificent condescension—Dian Fossey, born to a home of comfort and privilege that she left by her own choice to live among a race faced with extinction.… And if you think that the distance Christ had to come to take the likeness of Man is not so great as that from man to gorilla, then you don’t know men. Or gorillas. Or God.” And, as per her wish, she was buried in the graveyard of her slain gorillas, next to Digit.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“All things pass away. Love may live for a month or a year, but sooner or later, it leaves.”
I stopped working with the mortar. “No,” I told her, because my heart knew better. “That is not true.”
“Have you lived so long as I?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But I have lived long enough to know that love doesn’t die.” I might not remember my wife’s face or her name, but I remembered her smell, the touch of her hand, and the sound of her laughter. Not even the witch’s magic could steal that from me. I loved my wife still, and the pain of her loss burned in my heart. “Not if you cherish it. Love, like any living thing, needs to be fed. Only if you starve it will it die.”
― Patricia Briggs, Shifting Shadows