Simon

“Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“It would be hard to know what gigantic proportion of human life is spent in this same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can’t tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us,—for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have felt that if I let it go forever, I should have no light through the darkness of this life”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss