East of Eden

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite?. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree
blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man?s importance in the world can be measured by the quantity and number of his glories.

John Steinbeck