Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and … - John Crowley

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:

I know that things can’t stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done.