The fatal flaw of gravity; when you are down, everything falls down on you.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

[John Craske] painted like a man giving witness under oath to a wild story.

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week.

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.

The baby romped on my lap like a short stout salmon.

To think of losing is to lose already.