I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.