Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you. "Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. "It's life that looks so in its presence. Death is peace and pardon. Does any one deserve happiness? Let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence. "Does anything from without change us?" her husband mused aloud. "We're brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking, nowadays. "Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. Fortunately, they're rare." To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will.... SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY, V1 [WH#18][wh1sw10.txt]3371 The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow. I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of everything that I used to be sure of. But the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared themselves nothing that they had time for. Men would say anything from a reckless and culpable optimism. While they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.... SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY, V2 [WH#19][wh2sw10.txt]3372 It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier for it than anybody else. He buys my poverty and not my will. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive than if he had not been there. He lost the sense of his wife's presence, and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of absent- minded men learn to resign themselves. The disadvantage of living long is that we get too much into the hands of other people. SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY, V3 [WH#20][wh3sw10.txt]3373 Summoned the passengers to declare that they had nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at the dock. It's the illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them, and at their age the Kenbys can't have them. You expected the ideal. And that's what makes all the trouble, in married life: we expect too much of each other--we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy. She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her.