“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

Ursula Le Guin

The Other Wind

On Brighton Beach, the tourists say,

        the ice cream vendors come this way,

and come and go,

          and come and go,

on Brighton Beach,

        the tourists know.

On Brighton Beach, the bathers say,

        the shifting waves are quick and gay,

and come and go,

       and come and go,

on Brighton Beach,

        the bathers know.

On Brighton Beach, I've never heard

        the sleeping sand to say a word.

But come and go,

        and come and go,

the dreaming sand

        will never know.