Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.

You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.

As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.' But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight.

It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.

There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.