KS

“She watched him from the beach as he went farther and farther out on the reef, and saw him at last on the final edge, staring toward the open sea, breakers crashing beside his tiny figure, and she knew there were all sorts of romantic ideas pouring through his mind about life, the sea, nature, the size of the universe, man is a tiny creature, etc. etc. But she did not feel like sneering at him for it; she began to have images of this man, locked somewhere in a prison cell away from all possible thoughts of immensity, and she felt a great wave of pity for him, for the loss of his youth, for his naive, childlike expectation that the past was all over and he could just start from where he was and bury it all behind him and become a cultured person. It made her feel so bitter she wanted to cry.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“The burden of getting older was borne alone,”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“At the weekends,’ Christopher says, ‘when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.’ He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. ‘But mostly, and in several ways, I’m amazed I’m able to hold the hand of the person I love.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time