Cicada

When a cicada comes out of the ground to enter the last stage of it's life cycle, it looks more like a fat, earth-stained grubworm than a winged thing. Laboriously it climbs up the trunk of a tree, pulling itself along on legs that hardly seem to belong to it, for they move with painful awkwardness as though the creature had not yet got the hang of how to use them.

- Excerpt from Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."

"A smile in the midst of misery suggests existence of a hope; and the situation does not appear hopeless, does it?
And now: Good fortune on the path of thorns and stones-for such is the road! I am merely placing a few flowers on it!"

- August Strindberg in a letter to Harriet Bosse 19 November, 1900

“A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares.”

- Writer and editor Elbert Hubbard