What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.

It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose.

[I began to unload] the pyramid of honors, civic and literary, which had been heaped on me by the headlong process of rewarding a popular success. One day, I sat down and wrote a wholesale lot of letters of resignation. When I finished, I didn't belong to a single authors club or patriotic society. I was myself again, whatever that was.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.

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