The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

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

It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

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

What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, -- form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.

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.