For 35 years I’ve carried a quotation in my wallet. More precisely, I’ve moved the quotation, clipped from a now-defunct newspaper, from wallet to wallet to wallet over the decades.
The quotation is from Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers”:
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”