Don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. 

A.A. Milne

Friendships that are purely of our own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits.

Montaigne

He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?

Michel de Montaigne

For Kevin

Death wipes everything away
Except for the living.
We are each a world.
And all there will ever be.


Caught in the ether.  

There can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name , unless the parties be persuaded of each other's honesty, and be generally congenial the one to the other; since from difference in feeling springs also difference in conduct.

 Thucydides (Chapter IV), The History of the Peloponnesian War

You should only pick your own nose.


Heard from a nice lady in Iowa.

The world has few greater pleasures than that which two friends enjoy, in tracing back, at some distant time, those transactions and events through which they have passed together.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson