But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forev… - Lois McMaster Bujold

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

He had been the end point of human evolution. At this moment he abruptly felt more like a missing link. I thought I knew everything. Surely I knew nothing. How had his own life become such a surprise to him, so utterly rearranged? His brain had whirled with a thousand plans for these tiny lives, visions of the future both hopeful and dire, funny and fearful. For a moment, it seemed to come to a full stop. I have no idea who these two people are going to be.

I have taken up the art of bonsai for a hobby. The ancient Japanese are said to have worked on a single tree for as long as a hundred years. Or perhaps it only seemed like it.