Let your wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend
yourself, by a handsome reply, than the sword to wound
others, though with never so facetious a reproach,
remembering that a word cuts deeper than a sharper
weapon, and the wound it makes is longer curing.

—Osborn

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Beware the fury of a patient man.

—Dryden

History says don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed-for tidal wave
of justice can rise up
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

—Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.

—Jim Harrison

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

—Robert Frost

When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone.

I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me.

Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and the fire.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me.

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars.

Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We'll rise above these earthly cares.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Please remember me.

—Loreena McKennitt, Dante's Prayer

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

—Swinburne

Not a day passes over this earth,
but men and women of no note do
great deeds, speak great words
and suffer noble sorrows.

—Charles Reed

You're not anyone really, you never were. Oh, you
thought you were when your head was too small for your
illusions. But illusions aren't important now, you
don't have to be anything, even yourself, because
yourself was just something you had to make up, and
then you thought you had to carry it around with you.
What a relief to lay it down and walk away, and forget it.
Just to be part of what's around you is enough.

—The Creatures

And he said, 'I want to live as an honest man
To get all I deserve and to give all I can
and to love a young woman who I don't understand
Your Highness, your ways are very strange.'

—Suzanne Vega

When in distress with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate;
Wishing me like to one more rich in fate
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's state,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Then in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Haply I think of thee and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen Earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate.
For thy remembered love such sweet joy brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown
Slowly, or rapidly — unwilling still
For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.
Nor should I now, but that I've known you long;
That you first taught me all the sweets of song:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o'er summer seas;

—Keats, from To Charles Cowden Clarke

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he
is the only animal that is struck with the difference
between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt

It was the beginning of the end of an era.
An era defined by scandal after scandal, conspiracy theory
after conspiracy theory, and lie after lie.
An era in which name calling and bullying were normalized.
An era in which norms were repeatedly and brazenly violated.
An era in which the President fanned the flames of division
and cheered on calls for his political opponents to be imprisoned.
An era which will end with hundreds of thousands dead as a result
of a horribly managed pandemic.

—Oliver Darcy, CNN, November 7th 2020