Heidi'sbooks

“Looking back upon the year's accumulated heap of troubles, Margaret wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time! And yet day by day had, of itself, and by itself, been very endurable--small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth ... that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe