The band was playing one of those songs of Hank Williams, the one about the wild side of life, and the music floated over the car tops and touched me. I felt lost from everybody, and from myself included, laying on a wagon sheet in a pasture-land of cars. Only the tune of the song reached me, but the tune was enough. It fit the night and the country and the way I was feeling, and fit them better than anything I knew. What few stories the dancing people had to tell were already told in the worn-out words of songs like that one, and their kind of living, the few things they knew and lived to a fare-thee-well were in the sad high tune. City people probably wouldn't believe there were folks simple enough to live their lives out on sentiments like those--but they didn't know. Laying there, thinking of all the things the song brought up in me, I got more peaceful. The words I knew of it, about the wild side of life, reminded me of Hud and Lily, but more than that, the whole song reminded me of Hermy and Buddy and the other boys I knew. All of them wanted more and seemed to end up with less; they wanted excitement and ended up stomped by a bull or smashed against a highway; or they wanted a girl to court; and anyway, whatever it was they wanted, that was what they ended up doing without. That song ended, and another one began, and it ended and then I got up and went back into the dark arena.
-Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By
The way things happened, one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't tell if you were young or old.
-Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
It is hardly surprising if we are driven by blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men.
-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
If the enjoyment of any earthly blessing brings with it any measure of happiness, the memory of that splendid day can never be destroyed by the burden however great of growing evil.
-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
It is the nature of human affairs to be fraught with anxiety; they never prosper perfectly and they never remain constant.
-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy.
-Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
