“You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vis...”

“The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. ”

“I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl," he wrote. "You must expect to give yourself up when you come." For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itsel...”

“No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.”

“But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was muc...”

“When you smile, you bloom.”

“Bloom as if you want to make the whole world beautiful.”

“I tend the flowers of my mindWatering our memories as they bloom”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their o...”

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoys famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it ta...”