Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.

Some people say 'I want to be a writer,' and some people say, 'I want to write.'

Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.

Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. - Shaman's Crossing by Robin Hobb

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?