The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.

The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.

I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.

But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence

I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.