“We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar….”

“Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

“Houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still.”

“Vampires.I´ve come across a few of them through the years, thought that I got rid of them, Fate wanted otherwise..”

“‎Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence. Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality; and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy. They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight off our waking toils. They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity. They pass like spirits of the past—they speak like sibyls of the future; they have power— the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were not—what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows—Are they so? Is not the past all shadow?—What are they? Creations of the mind?—The mind can make substances, and people planets of their own, with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed, perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.”