I like subordination, quoth my uncle Toby... - Laurence Sterne

It had ever been the custom of the family, and by length of time was almost become a matter of common right, that the eldest son of it should have free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts before marriage, — not only for the sake of bettering his own private parts, by the benefit of exercise and change of so much air — but simply for the mere delectation of his fancy, by the feather put into his cap, of having been abroad.

Time wastes too fast… the days and hours of it… are flying over our heads like little clouds on a windy day, never to return more – everything presses on – whilst thou art twisting the lock, - see! it grows grey… and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

— Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there ever was such a man — if not, there's an end of the matter. — Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise æra in which so great a man lived; — whether, for instance, before or after the patriarchs, &c. — to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all, is a little cruel, — 'tis not doing as they would be done by — happen that as it — My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally of his impatience — of wondering why he was begot, — wishing himself dead; — sometimes worse: —