If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.

Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.