Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.