The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big.

The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family.

A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever I go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.