“When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities.”

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.”

“Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania — then might I write largely enough for our subjects.”

“The ideal state is meekness, or humility, or the semi-invalid state of the old. Year after year I am becoming nobler and nobler. If I can live to be decrepit enough, I shall be a saint.”

“But some of us have been educated by surprises out of much that we were 'absolutely sure' of...”

“We cannot define. Nothing has ever been finally figured out, because there is nothing final to figure out”

“[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”