How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It has been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

Your life will not be flat and dull eventhough you know that your war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something goodand ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live toabolish death? No--we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our sparkof life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages…

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.