I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.