Long After Summer Quotes

“Jot and Johanna were dancing; they were young, and their hearts were full of innocence and wonder. They were no more than children, but they were in love, with life, and with the world, and with each other. They saw only their own bright youth; they could not look ahead to age or death. Now, for them, the summer would never end; they did not even look ahead to fall. I envied them; and at the same time, I felt sorry for them because they would never again be so young, so happy, and so beautiful.”
― Robert Nathan, Long After Summer

“I thought how small and mortal and defenseless was man, how short-lived his youth, how uncertain his joy … how he is hurried through a narrow space called time, unable to turn or to retrace his steps — unable to look ahead or behind, seeing nothing, except what is under his nose — uncertain even if what he sees is what it seems to be. For the great pattern of the suns is repeated over and over again, in a blade of grass or in a drop of water; to the spider or the ant, man is as incomprehensible as God. How meager and meaningless the life of a beetle seems to us; how pitiful our own may seem to some undreamed-of power.”
― Robert Nathan, Long After Summer