Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.