Every now and again it would be considered wholesome for me to be more with people of my own age. Demotion to such company was a sapless exile. Their inanity was insufferable.

Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand!

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire.

Only a very small percentage can regard conditions from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own shoe-pinch.

I'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I'd be born an idiot, which would be better still.

Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.

My mother is a good woman - a very good woman - and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.