One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him. - Lemony Snicket

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. - José Ortega y Gasset

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe. - Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways, 1965

Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin