I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. – Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so. – François VI de la Rochefoucault, Maxims

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When he is in the room with other persons, speech stops, as if there were a corpse in the apartment. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838 journal, about Jones Very