1) “Call no man happy till he is dead.” - Aeschylus
2) “It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home – only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.” - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
3) “Effective magic is transcendent nature.” - George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Middlemarch