Source: The Notebook
“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.”
Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 6 (Cuba).
A Lost Lady (1923), Part II, Ch. 9
Context: He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story.
This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.”
“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”
Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfiled Park
Context: "I shall soon be rested," said Fanny; "to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment."
Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
Letters and essays
Context: Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.
Große Stunde! Mit dem zweiten Menschen, dem anderen verjubelt und verträumt. Tage, Jahre sammeln sich. Eine ruhende stille Insel im Ozean Welt sind wir. Ende und Anfang! Grenze zwischen Leben und Ewigkeit! Rausch, Fülle, Dasein!
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)
