“A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.”

“Solitary the thrush,The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding thesettlements,Sings by himself a song.Song of the bleeding throat!”

“It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.”

“The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.”

“I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words”

“Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.”