Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Nature....she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207