“[Perverse] unreason has its own logical processes”

“Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...”

“Youth is insolent; it is its right – its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence…”

“The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

“Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.”

“There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.”

“Everything is inconceivable. The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions.”