“Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.”

“A life of short duration...could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

“And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of much longer duration. It is our passions which draw the outline of our books, the ensuing intervals of repose which write them.”

“It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.”

“Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.”

“This is my one and only life, and it is a great and terrible and short and endless thing, and none of us come out of it alive”