I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

Fear no more, says the heart.

I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

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?