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No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy. Also around bedtime was my singing time. I'd pace up and down the well-worn path in the dust of my rock singing all the show tunes I could remember, at the top of my voice too, with nobody to hear except the deer and the bear.

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Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of theirwork. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, to be the dwelling of man, we say, so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.

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The warrior of light has learnt that God uses solitude to teach cohabitation. He uses rage to show the infinite value of peace. He uses tediousness to underline the importance of adventure and abandonment.
God uses silence to give a teaching on the responsability of words.
He uses tiredness so to understand the importance of awakening. He uses illness to underline the blessing of health.
God uses fire to give a lesson on water. He uses Earth so to understand the importance of air. He uses death to show the importance of life.

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Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

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When the road behind you is longer that the one you have ahead o you, you notice something you never saw before: the path you took wasn't straight but full of crossings, every step had an arrow indicating a different direction; from there started a lane, from there a grassy trail that lost itself in the woods. One of these byways you took not noticing, some other you hadn't even seen; those you ignored you have no idea where they would've taken you, if in a better or worse place; you don't know but equally you feel regret. You could've done something and you didn't, you went back instead of going on. Snakes and ladders, do you remember that game? Life more or less is the same way. Along the crossroads of your life you'll meet other lives, to know them or not to know them, to live them or not to live them completely or to leave them all together depends only on the choice of a moment; even if you don't know it, between going straight or deviating you often gamble your existence, that of who is next to you.

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I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when every thing is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me — now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives. I could do it, and none could hinder me; but where is the use? I don't care for striking — I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case. I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

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I love him better than myself Ellen; and I know it by this: I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be: that proves I love him better than myself.

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Don't you think Hindley would be proud of his son, if he could see him? Almost as proud as I am of mine. But there's this difference, one is gold put to the use of paving stones; and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver. Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first-rate qualities, and they are lost — rendered worse than unavailing.

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Had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would raise a hand against him. I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drank his blood! But till then, if you don't believe me, you don't know me - till then, I would have died by by inches I touched a single hair on his head!

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The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.