Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know.

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.