The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

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 no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.