“But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.”

“You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.”

“Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.”

“Numbers constitute the only universal language.”

“If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick.”

“Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.”

“Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.”