A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.

What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.