--Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac
A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the church bells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
--Cormac McCarthy, Cities Of The Plain
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or forty-seven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
--William Faulkner, Light In August