Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.