Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

Life is the little that is left over from dying.

Here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age—and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

AS THE TIME DRAWS NIGH As the time draws nigh, glooming, a cloud, A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse The States awhile—but I cannot tell whither or how long; Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, my voice will suddenly cease. O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?… And yet it is enough, O soul! O soul! we have positively appear'd—that is enough.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

THE WILD ROSE" — BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.

Sometimes...I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift.

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality...

It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages... in the climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which are worth whole months, — I might say — even years.

The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.