Pretty good writing, I say

"I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn't want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor's office, or coming back from someplace you didn't enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus-all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. No­body seemed surprised at all when I told them I'd learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story." While she talked, Sophie's quick fingers were dealing with a hem, and Daily Alice couldn't always hear her because she talked with pins in her mouth. The dream was hard to follow anyway; Daily Alice forgot each incident as soon as Sophie told it, just as though she were dreaming them herself. She picked up and put down a pair of satin shoes, and wandered out onto the tiny balcony of her oriel window. "I got frightened then," So­phie was saying. "I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn't know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I'd made a mistake starting this. Anyhow ... " Daily Alice looked down the front way, a brown drive with a tender spine of weed, all trembling in leaf shadow. Down at the end of the drive, gateposts grew up with a sudden curve from a wall, each topped with a pitted ball like a gray stone orange. As she looked, a Traveler turned hesitantly in at the gate.

"Sophie's Dream" in John Crowley, Little, Big, page 24.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Courtesy of The Writer's Almanac

And a couple days ago The Writer's Almanac reminded us of Keats's famous letter to Fanny Brawne, which I won't quote but which you can -- make that should -- read here.