That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.

Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?.... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

Man is a thought-adventurer.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.