from The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone, chapter 18 (T.H. White)

The sun, as it rose, tinged the quick-silver of the creeks and the gleaming slime itself with flame. The curlew, who had been piping their mournful plaints since long before the light, flew now from weed-bank to weed-bank. The widgeon, who had slept on water, came whistling their double notes, like whistles from a Christmas cracker. The mallard toiled from land, against the wind. The redshanks scuttled and prodded like mice. A cloud of tiny dunlin, more compact than starlings, turned in the air with the noise of a train. The black-guard of crows rose from the pine trees on the dunes with merry cheers. Shore birds of every sort populated the tide line, filling it with business and beauty.

The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight, were of such intense beauty that the boy was moved to sing. He wanted to cry a chorus to life, and, since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or glee. The vault of daybreak filled itself with heralds, and this is what they sang:

You turning world, pouring beneath our pinions,
Hoist the hoar sun to welcome morning's minions.

See, on each breast the scarlet and vermilion,
Hear, from each throat the clarion and carillion.

Hark, the wild wandering lines in black battalions,
Heaven's horns and hunters, dawn-bright hounds and stallions

Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings
Comes Anser albifrons, and sounds, and sings.

from Everything I Know About Love, Thirty (Dolly Alderton)

It was my friend Pandora who first recognized that my useless superpower is a propensity for needless nostalgia.  I have an unerring ability to metabolize, ritualize and memorialize the passing of time at breakneck speed so everything becomes a grand moment in history within a year of it happening.

'You can refer to a house party you went to last month with the same wistfulness and romance as if it were the Summer of Sixty-Nine,' she commented.  I didn't deny it.

from The Stranger in the Mirror, chapter 1, Message in a Bottle (Jane Shilling)

Meanwhile I notice that my contemporaries have gone quiet.  The bold candour with which we always used to report to each other from the front lines of our lives has been replaced with a muffled discretion.  Once upon a time we couldn't wait to tell the next episode.  The vagaries of our lovers, our employers, our parents, our shopping habits, our looks - all became part of a rolling comic monologue.

With pregnancy and childbirth, a rich new vein of material emerged: the preposterous indignities of pregnancy, from the moment your navel pops inside out, mutating overnight from a sexy hollow to a ludicrous fleshy bobble, to the weary realisation, towards the end of gestation, that you'd pull down your knickers and offer your underparts for examination to almost anyone who demanded it with sufficiently crisp authority; the outrageous shock of labour, the unexpected catastrophe of raw feeling - rage, exhaustion, terror, boredom, love - with which the passionate intensity of motherhood is compounded.

Time passed, the children began to grow up, but still the conversation continued: more fractured now, and at longer intervals, reduced by the rending demands of work and family; the savage battle to secure some scraps of time in which to remind oneself of who one used to be, from a daily soap opera to erratic messages in bottles, brief bulletins flung into the overwhelming tides of domesticity, often saying little more than, 'I am still here.  Are you?'