"From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row."

"There's no earthly way of knowing Which direction we are going There's no knowing where we're rowing Or which way the river's flowing Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing? Not a speck of light is showing So the danger must be growing Are the fires of hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing? Yes, the danger must be growing 'Cause the rowers keep on rowing And they're certainly not showing Any signs that they are slowing!"

"If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret."

"Wishers and woulders be small householders."

"On ne peut désirer ce qu'on ne connaît pas."

"Quoniam id fieri quod vis non potest Id velis quod possis."

"I've often wished that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year, A handsome house to lodge a friend, A river at my garden's end, A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land, set out to plant a wood."

"If I live to grow old, as I find I go down, Let this be my fate in a country town; May I have a warm house, with a stone at my gate, And a cleanly young girl to rub my bald pate. May I govern my passions with an absolute sway, Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away, Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay."

"Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious and free, First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea."

"Vous l'avez voulu, vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l'avez voulu."

"I wish I knew the good of wishing."

"With all thy sober charms possest, Whose wishes never learnt to stray."

"Little I ask; my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone (A very plain brown stone will do), That I may call my own; And close at hand is such a one In yonder street that fronts the sun."

"And the evil wish is most evil to the wisher."

"Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long."

"Was man in der Jugend wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle."

"O, that I were where I would be, Then would I be where I am not; For where I am I would not be, And where I would be I can not."

""Man wants but little here below Nor wants that little long," 'Tis not with me exactly so; But 'tis so in the song. My wants are many, and, if told, Would muster many a score; And were each wish a mint of gold, I still should long for more."

"What folly can be ranker. Like our shadows, Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines."

"Man wants but little, nor that little long; How soon must he resign his very dust, Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!"

"Q: You just don't get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did."

"Trifles, light as air."

"And many strokes, though with a little axe, Hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak."

"A trial and a literary text do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but, technically, is a search for a decision, and thus, in essence, it seeks not simply truth but in a finality: a force of resolution. A literary text is, on the other hand, a search for meaning, for expression, for heightened significance, and for symbolic understanding."

"What dire offence from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things."

"At every trifle scorn to take offence; That always shows great pride or little sense."

"These little things are great to little man."

"This is a gimcrack That can get nothing but new fashions on you."

"I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened."

"Seeks painted trifles and fantastic toys, And eagerly pursues imaginary joys."

"Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of; they just turn up some of the ill weeds on to the surface."

"As sure as ever God puts His children in the furnace, He will be in the furnace with them."

"There are no crown-wearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers here below."

"Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd."

"But noble souls, through dust and heat, Rise from disaster and defeat The stronger."

"'Tis a lesson you should heed, Try, try, try again. If at first you don't succeed, Try, try, try again."

"The child of trial, to mortality And all its changeful influences given; On the green earth decreed to move and die, And yet by such a fate prepared for heaven."

"Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,— And the drops will slacken so; Weep, weep—and the watch thou keepest, With a quicker count will go. Think,—the shadow on the dial For the nature most undone, Marks the passing of the trial, Proves the presence of the sun."

"For Felman the criminal trial always recapitulates law’s troubled relation to trauma. The structure of trauma, she argues, controls the trial, not the reverse. Trials revisit our inability to reason in the face of trauma, our inability to produce an adequate historical record of its workings. As a result, we turn to literature to remember precisely what cannot be made available in the law. Thus the verdict in the Simpson case is at once about what law’s history remembers and what it forgets. As Felman puts it, the verdict in a landmark trial is a decision about “what to admit into, and what to transmit of, collective memory.” She notes that a legal case can be, and Simpson was, a “locus of embodied history, a ‘site of memory’ in Nora’s terms. That case, like other landmark trials, “triggers inadvertently the movement of a repetition or the dynamics of a “legal recall”. . . . [It] repeats . . . all these repetitions-legal, literary, psychoanalytical, historical-by which the trial tries, and retries to resolve the trauma, and by which the trauma inadvertently repeats itself as an unconscious legal memory under the conscious legal process.”"

"One of the key elements that Felman claims marks a landmark trial is the way it repeats elements of other trials. The landmark trial is a site of memory, a moment of legal intertextuality in which key elements of the drama of law are reenacted."

"The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides."

"Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them…. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets "with a lie in their right hand?"… Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed—have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives."

"It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization—the of respectability…. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise."

"It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of social position…. Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilized mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with."

"See, here's a shadow found; the human nature Is made th' umbrella to the Deity, To catch the sunbeams of thy just Creator; Beneath this covert thou may'st safely lie."