Famous quotes containing the words penance and/or stare:
“I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)