Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.