Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.