People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again — but it finds a tougher surface. - Willa Cather

I suppose the test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

"Then you do not believe in progress?" "Change is not always progress, Monseigneur."

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.