Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

that voice was a deathless song.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?