Sarah

“During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world's suffering, violence and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“He sensed he learned a lesson, although the precise meaning of that lesson wasn't clear to him.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and has not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to this moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Now what sort of books will he need? There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown of every education. The crown - as sound habits of mind and conduct are the throne. No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again.”
― H.G. Wells, The Food of the Gods