From T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter…”

- T.S. Eliot, from “The Burial of the Dead” section of The Waste Land.
Full poem here.

W.H. Auden, from "Poem #4"

“…But happy now, though no nearer each other,
We see the farms lighted all along the valley;
Down at the mill-shed the hammering stops
And men go home.

Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.”

- W.H. Auden, from “Poem #4”

The Elder's Speech to Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

"...What is wrong? For the present you do not belong here. I give you my blessing for your great task of obedience in the world at large. You have much traveling yet to do. And you will have to get married, you will have to. You will have to endure everything before you return again. And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.”

On Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

“Before anything else I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was in no sense a fanatic, nor even in my opinion at any rate a mystic at all. I shall state in advance my complete opinion: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he had struck out along the monastery road it was only because it had at that time made a strong impression on him and presented itself to him, so to speak, as an ideal of deliverance for his soul, straining as it was out of the murk of worldly hatred unto the light of love.”

Robert Lowell, from "The Poet at Seven" (an Imitation of Rimbaud)

What he feared most
were the sticky, lost December Sundays,
when he used to stand with his hair gummed back
at a little mahogany stand, and hold
a Bible pocked with cabbage-green mould.
Each night in his alcove, he had dreams.
He despised God, the National Guard,
and the triple drum-beat
of the town crier calling up the conscripts.
He loved the swearing
workers, when they crowded back, black
in the theatrical twilight to their wards.
He felt clean
when he filled his lungs with the smell—
half hay fever, half iodine—
of the wheat,
he watched its pubic golden tassels swell
and steam in the heat,
then sink back calm.

- Robert Lowell, from Imitations