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

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

Cruelty is the only sin.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.