The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?