Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Something great is about to happen to me: I'm about to love somebody very much.

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?

...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength

and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.