Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old

A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.