John Williams

To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.

he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?