“Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...”

“Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.”

“But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.”

“It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.”

“Be near me when my light is low,When the blood creeps, and the nerves prickAnd tingle; and the heart is sick,And all the wheels of Being slow.Be near me when the sensuous frameIs rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;And Time, a maniac scattering dust,And Life, a fury slinging flame.Be near me when my faith is dry,And men the flies of latter spring,That lay their eggs, and sting and singAnd weave their petty cells and die.Be near me when I fade away,To point the term of human strife,And on the low dark verge of lifeThe twilight of eternal day.”

“Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.”

“But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.”