"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not want to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to live with resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
~Henry David Thoreau,
Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854)
"The fox sat in the wilderness of rocks beside the huge black fox of dreams.
"'All that I did,' she said, 'everything I tried to do. All for nothing.'
"'Nothing is done entirely for nothing,' said the fox of dreams. 'Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.'"
~Neil Gaiman, The Dream Hunters (1999)
"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
~Albert Camus
"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
~Albert Camus
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