Talbot Hook

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing—(how am I to put it?)—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement