“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being”

“It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King...”

“Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.”

“We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!”

“…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination”

“Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.”

“I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser, but I was certainly not a physical impossibility”