Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair? -Walker Percy

May my silences become more accurate. -Theodore Roethke

Red roses for young lovers. French beans for longstanding relationships. -Ruskin Bond

The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of his tail. -Rabindranath Tagore

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder. -Gilbert Keith Chesterton

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -Annie Dillard

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. -Madame De Stael

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. -Maya Angelou

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. -Barbara Kingsolver

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

-William Shakespeare