I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.