Mabel

“Next morning, while her children were still asleep in their tent, Evie got up early. The acorn she had planted the day before had sprung to life and was nearly ten feet high. Sitting on the fallen log where the forest boy had sat thirty years earlier, she listened. There was no dancing partner. Maybe she was now too old, but the oak trees did sing for her.”
― Robert Reid, The Empress:

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.'

The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Next morning, we drank endless cups of coffee in the airport restaurant…Suddenly wide-eyed, she stared past me: “Good grief, some of the people they let in here.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows