Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

The artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.

We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

He wants everything to be so simple—as, alas, it never is in real life!