If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.

Women alone stir my imagination.