“There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.”

“I went home, with new matters for my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.”

“I have often remarked- I suppose everybody has- that one's going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for a change in it.”

“I found myself in a place that was thorny, but because I was so used to being there, it bore out certain twisted sensations of comfort. It's a place called «alone».”

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. ”

“My sleep wasn't peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.”