Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.