There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

A man needs a purpose for real health.

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

...she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.

I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.