I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don’t want to look around any more: I don’t need to look around for anything.

Sylvia Plath

The joy that isn’t shared dies young.

Anne Sexton

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

John Gillespie MaGee, Jr.

I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset’s glories – thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star – but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.

It traced strange pictures on the quivering air –
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes –
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life – I never could tell where.
But I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home.

H.P. Lovecraft