I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.

His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.