Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- John Updike, "Memoirs" (1989)
Voyager, c'est naître et mourir à chaque instant.
To travel is to be born and to die every moment.
- Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables" (1862)
But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain - thus the beginning has its difficulty. The one making the resolution has, of course, not finished, because in that case he would have experienced that of which the resolution is the beginning. But if no resolution is made, the same thing can happen to such a person as sometimes happens to a speaker who only when he has finished speaking knows how he should have spoken: only when he has lived, only then does he know how he should have lived (what a sorry yield from life!) and how he should have made the beginning with the good resolution - what a bitter wisdom now that a whole life lies between the beginning and the one who is dying.
- Søren Kierkegaard, "Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions" (1845)
toshi kurenu
kasa kite waraji
hakinagara
another year is gone
I still wear a traveler's hat
and straw sandals on my feet
- Matsuo Bashō (1685)
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