No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.

Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.