We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.