The woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for.

What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness?

We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

The woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for.

Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It's like sleep almost. A freedom from self, from ugliness.

The writer's advantage, in some respects, over those whose expression lies in other fields, is in the privilege of a double - sometimes a triple - living. Pleasure multiplied in the mirrors of words, and pain siphoned off in words.

You can't be a little bit saintly any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.