Em

“I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.”
― Charles Dickens (David Copperfield), David Copperfield

“You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“They had seemed to me then, as now, like paintings about time. It felt like the artist was looking at the field with two gazes. The first was the gaze of youth, awakening to a dawn of pink light on the grass, and looking with possibility on everything, the work he had done just the day before, the work he had still to do in the future. The second was the gaze of an older man, perhaps older than Monet had been when he painted them, who was looking at the same view, and remembering these earlier feelings and trying to recapture them, only he was unable to do so without infusing them with his own sense of inevitability.”
― Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day