Silas Newcomb

“O gods, \ If any gods will listen, I deserve \ Punishment surely, I do not refuse it, \ But lest, in living, I offend the living, Offend the dead in death, drive me away \ From either realm, change me somehow, refuse me \ Both life and death!
-- Myrrha, before being transformed into a tree”
― Ovid

“I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“[I]t is the wine that leads me on,
the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing
at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the
man to dancing... it even
tempts him to blurt out stories
better never told.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina