We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

Life would split apart without letters.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.