To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Half a calamity is better than a whole one.

He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.

Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.

The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.