Life's bare as a bone.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.