The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.