Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. - Thomas Hardy

We two kept house, the Past and I, The Past and I; I tended while it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone.

Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!