Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships.

Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for this priceless treasure that is confided to my lifelong keeping. You cannot see its waves as they flow toward you, darling, but in these lines you will hear...the distant beating of its surf.

[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule-and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.