Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If I could come back again in a different life, a different time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and muskets and pistols came along.”
–Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
“Crows are bored. They suffer from being too intelligent for their station in life. Respectable evolutionary success is simply not, for these brainy and complex birds, enough. They are dissatisfied with the narrow goals and horizons of that tired old Darwinian struggle. On the lookout for a new challenge. Keep that in mind next time you run into a crow. Look the bird in the eye. Consider its frustrations. Try to say something stimulating.”
–David Quammen, Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature
Summer afternoon–summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
–Henry James
Who has not sat before her own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
–Rainer Maria Rilke
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
–Mark Twain
