“It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.”

“I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.”

“In a world of fools, I was, I think, to him one of the greater fools.”

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”

“There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.”

“No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.”

“It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.”