“I'm happiest when most awayI can bear my soul from its home of clayOn a windy night when the moon is brightAnd the eye can wander through worlds of light—When I am not and none beside—Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky—But only spirit wandering wideThrough infinite immensity.”

“What can I do my friends, if I do not know?I am neither Christian nor Jew, nor Muslim nor Hindu. What can I do? What can I do?Not of the East, nor of the West, Nor of the land, nor of the sea,Not of nature's essence, nor of circling heavens. What could I be?”

“It is not night when I do see your face,Therefore I think I am not in the night;Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,For you in my respect are all the world:Then how can it be said I am alone,When all the world is here to look on me?”

“When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”

“My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

“The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. ("Family")”