If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by the way?

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.