All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.

We change whether we like it or not.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.