A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.

Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.