future Quotes

“The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic that was in the world.”

“It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.”

“My parents never once suggested I should withdraw from school, ever. Though we loved school, we hadn’t realized how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our homework wasn’t just a way of passing time, it was our future.”

″‘See these perfect rows, Miguel? They are like what my life would have been. These rows know where they are going. Straight ahead. Now my life is like the zigzag in the blanket on Mama’s bed.‘”

“We are like the phoenix,” said Abuelita. “Rising again, with a new life ahead of us.”

“She soared with the anticipation of dreams she never knew she could have, of learning English, of supporting her family, of someday buying a tiny house.”

“Money is a guarantee that we may have what we want in the future. Though we need nothing at the moment it insures the possibility of satisfying a new desire when it arises.”

“May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.”

“The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.”

“The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.”

“I am told that I am vague and confused, and if I am vague and confused now, what shall I be later on?”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”

“Like someone who has imperfect vision, we see things, which are remote from us; so much light the Supreme Ruler still gives to us; when they draw nigh, or are, our intellect is altogether void; and except what others bring us, we know nothing of your human state.”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla.”

“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”

“... the psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

“The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

″... this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”

″‘... it’s not enough to know what the future ​is. You have to know what it means.‘”

“Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.”

“We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.”

“Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.”

“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out.” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.”

“Freedom or death lay at this table. Her past and future were seated on a glass throne.”

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.”

“You think ... yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. ”

“I take a good long look at her. I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to.”

“This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future.”

“The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.”

“It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same. He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence. The last time he was there, Jurgis had thought of little but his family; but now he was free to listen to these men, and to realize that he was one of them—that their point of view was his point of view, and that the way they kept themselves alive in the world was the way he meant to do it in the future.”

“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The ‘better life’ she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.”

“We may not have a future, but you can’t deny we have a past.”

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”

“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”

“I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.”

“But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”

The order of future events was transient.

“The future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

“After all, tomorrow is another day!”

“Many of us slog through life without conscious awareness or intention. We set ourselves a course and we barrel ahead, without stopping to ask whether this path is fulfilling our most important goals. That’s partly because many of us believe that happiness is not possible in the here and now. We think we need to struggle now so that we will be happy in the future. So we postpone happiness and try to run into the future and attain the conditions of happiness that we don’t have now.”

“Notice I didn’t specify what kind of doom, so no matter what happens, I predicted it. How very wise of me.”

“Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn’t exist and never shall. There is only now.”

“Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future.”

“I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.”

“I wish that I had not been acquainted with the future.”

“I know myself a mortal, and my share In what the morrow brings no more than thine.”

“They are living in the moment. They are not ashamed of the past; they are not worried about the future. Little children express what they feel, and they are not afraid to love.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

“We shook hands and I watched him walk quickly away, tall, lean, bent forward with eagerness and hungry for the future, his metal capped shoes tapping against the sidewalk. Then he turned into Lee Avenue and was gone.”

“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”

“They were America’s elite fighters and the were going to die here, outnumbered by this determined rabble. Their future was setting with this sun on this day and in this place.”

“Ask yourself the question, ‘Will this matter a year from now?’ ”

“We’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have to play the roles you gave us.”

“The place and time of these miracles are dependent on His unchangeable will, in which things future are ordered as if already they were accomplished.”

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

“Thus the differences between the conservative and the radical seem to spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.”

“Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.”

“You will produce what you say. If you want to know what you will be like five years from now, just listen to what you are saying about yourself. With our words we can either bless our futures or we can curse our futures.”

“Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.”

“We will never know peace if we lose the present because we are trapped in the past and paralyzed by the future.”

“Yet do not cast all hope away. Tomorrow is unkown. Rede oft is found at the rising of the Sun.”

“None knows what the new day shall bring him.”

“Infuse your life with action. Don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. ”

“I scanned the group. Faces spoke to their future. I saw courage, anger, fear and confusion. Others were hopeless. They had already given up.”

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”

“A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future.”

“If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them.”

“The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.”

“I had agreed with Mother to look to the future, but secretly I dreamed of returning to the past.”

“Walter: You wouldn’t understand yet, son, but your daddy’s gonna make a transaction . . . a business transaction that’s going to change our lives. . . . That’s how come one day when you ‘bout seventeen years old I’ll come home . . . I’ll pull the car up on the driveway . . . just a plain black Chrysler, I think, with white walls—no—black tires . . . the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he’ll say, ‘Good evening, Mr. Younger.’ And I’ll say, ‘Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?’ And I’ll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we’ll kiss each other and she’ll take my arm and we’ll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you. . . . All the great schools in the world! And—and I’ll say, all right son—it’s your seventeenth birthday, what is it you’ve decided? . . . Just tell me, what it is you want to be—and you’ll be it. . . . Whatever you want to be—Yessir! You just name it, son . . . and I hand you the world!”

“Asagai, while I was sleeping in that bed in there, people went out and took the future right out of my hands! And nobody asked me, nobody consulted me – they just went out and changed my life.”

“Walter: Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me – just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me — a big, looming blank space – full of nothing. Just waiting for me. But it don’t have to be.”

“There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.”

“Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put no less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family.”

“Who cares what you want? The only thing that matters is what is good for you. Your mother and I only care about what is good for you. You go to school, you become a doctor, you be successful. Then you never have to work in a store like this. Then you have money and respect, and all the things you want will come. You find a nice girl and have children and you have the American Dream. Why would you throw your future away for temporary things that you only want right now?”

“Provide in advance for the needs of thy growing age and the protection of thy family.”

“Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden. Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future.”

“Today may be the enemy of your tomorrow. In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.”

“There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity.”

″‘We can never know,’ Simon answered slowly. ‘God hides the future from man’s eyes. We are forced to choose, not knowing. I have chosen Jesus.‘”

“Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to come.”

“In the immensity of this future that she conjured for herself, nothing specific stood out: the days ... were as near alike as waves are.”

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”

“The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.”

“There’s much more. There’s all that goes beyond – all ... that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.”

“Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back.”

“It’s just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, as opposed to what we want.”

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”

“The future will be what it will, and fretting about it will only make your fears more likely to come true.”

“We got a future.”

“The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”

“But this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)

“Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don’t know. And so it’s not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future—that is, beyond lunch.”

“But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”

“Without a past you can’t have a future.”

“If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations.”

“Tomorrow’s world will be shaped by what we teach our children today.”

“Regrets over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow are twin thieves that rob us of the moment.”

“You kill your future by mourning the past”

“Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.”

“Well, we all make mistakes, dear, so just put it behind you. We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.”

“ ‘Luck, good or bad,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is not the hand of God.’ ‘Luck,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.’ ”

“To compensate for the difficulties in their lives, people spend a lot of their time daydreaming, imagining a future full of adventure, success, and romance. If you can create the illusion that through you they can live out their dreams, you will have them at your mercy.”

“The higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”

“To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; There is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”

“Many people only see happiness in their future.”

“The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.”

“The basic mistake people make is to think that happiness is the goal!”

“The mutants are dead. The mutants are history. This is the mark of the future. Gotham City belongs to the Batman.”

“Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.”

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“He had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw the horror beneath. He saw a world of lovers forever parted of dreams never consummated of plans that never turned into reality.”

“He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like.”

“I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces.”

“It’s as if when you love someone, they become your reason.”

“When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.”

“You don’t want to abandon the skills and experience you have gained,but to find a new way to apply them. Your eye is on the future, not the past.Often such creative readjustments lead to a superior path for us—we are shaken out of our complacency and forced to reassess where we are headed.”

“Aye, I believe ye, Sassenach. But it would ha’ been a good deal easier if you’d only been a witch.”

“So I will always lean my heart as close to your soul as I can.”

“A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.”

“As long as I kept my mental focus on destinations that were ahead, destinations that I had the audacity to dream might hold a red Ferrari of my own, I protected myself from despair. The future was uncertain, absolutely, and there were many hurdles, twists, and turns to come, but as long as I kept moving forward, one foot in front of the other, the voices of fear and shame, the messages from those who wanted me to believe that I wasn’t good enough, would be stilled.”

“You need this armor to stop any onslaught of the enemy’s destructive arrows into your life and the lives of those you care about—both now and in the future.”

“The future was, very literally, in their own hands.”

“Milena, Bartolomeo, Helen, and Milos have left their prison-like boarding schools far behind, but their futures remain in peril. ”

“Annemarie felt a surge of sadness; the bond of their friendship had not broken, but it was as if Ellen had moved now into a different world, the world of her own family and whatever lay ahead for them.”

Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without much of a future. He’s pathetic at playing cards, hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey, and utterly devoted to his coffee-drinking dog, the Doorman.

“If this is the stone age and mum says the ice age is coming any minute now...how long is an age?”

“Her own future was close-folded still; but she leaned her head against the sun-warmed door, and closing her eyes, whispered, just as if she had been a child saying her prayers: ‘God bless aunt Miranda; God bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that is to be!‘”

“Our Koro was like an old whale stranded in an alien present, but that was how it was supposed to be, because he also had his role in the pattern of things, in the tides of the future”

“The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I a private school-master, I should say, Let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest.”

“I have a future ahead of me that will likely include an Ivy League education, an eventual law degree, and a career in public policy. Sadly, during the wee hours of this morning, literally none of that mattered.”

“We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.”

“Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.”

“We’ve got to base our future actions not on some desired Utopia but on what we have.”

“I’ve been in the revenge business for so long, now that it’s over I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”

“You have to let go. You have to let go because when you hold on, when you keep something alive inside of you, you are allowing for your past to take up the space in your heart and in your mind that is meant for your future.”

“A shared history does not entitle you to a future, my friend.”

“One day you will read in the National Geographic of a faraway land with no smelly bad traffic.”

“Foundling (noun) also wastrel. Stray people, usually children, found without a home or shelter on the streets of cities or even, amazingly, wandering exposed in the wilds. The usual destination for such orphaned children are workhouses, mills or mines, although a fortunate few may find their way to a foundlingery. Such a place can care for a small number of foundlings and wastrels, fitting them for a more productive life and sparing them the agonies of harder labor.”

″... there was nothing left to do to fill in the massive gap between that day and the next: my old life and my future. In a way I was dreading it, leaving all that behind, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.”

“Do not seek familiarity, do not keep searching for your past in your future. Trust what comes.”

“When you get nervous and worry about how things will turn out, it actually means you care about how things are going to go.”

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”

“It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.”

“The old world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every moment — it exists. The world of the future is not yet born, it is elusive, fluid, made of the light from which dreams are woven.”

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.”

“The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.”

“As only to be expected with a book written in 1975 about the “future” (2005) I had to suspend my disbelief a little more than usual. Apparently by now we should be living on the Moon and on the continental shelves, and have abolished the internal combustion engine.”

“You can’t see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

“Don’t insult me today just because I’m poor, you don’t know what my future holds!”

“He knew them like I knew them. Passed to him. Passed them to his little brother. Passed to my older brother. Passed to me. The Rules have always ruled. Past present future forever.”

“We are each responsible for all our experiences. Every thought we think is creating our future.”

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

“It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

″...our school motto: We Shape the Future. It sounds glorious, but with months left until graduation, I have no clue what the future looks like. If Opportunity shaped me, I didn’t notice.”

“Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

“She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.”

“Did you ever read that story about the man who traveled to the future and found everyone there insane? Everyone. But since they were all insane they didn’t know they were all insane. They all acted alike and so they thought themselves normal. And since our hero was the only sane one among them, he was abnormal; therefore, he was the insane one. To them, at least. Yes, Mr. Douglas, insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

“Infinite-minded leaders don’t ask their people to fixate on finite goals; they ask their people to help them figure out a way to advance toward a more infinite vision of the future that benefits everyone.”

“Even in the Future the Story Begins with Once Upon a Time.”

“I wondered if he had ever had a choice, or if he had ever felt trapped. Or if he had ever imagined a different life.”

“First we must accomplish the task at hand. An officer who looks too far ahead stumbles over his own boots.”

“The robbers of time are the past and the future. Man should bless the past, and forget it, if it keeps him in bondage, and bless the future, knowing it has in store for him endless joys, but live fully in the now.”

“Move on in your life. If you create a more fulfilling future, you will find it easier to forget the past.”

“She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but forbidden to reach for it.”