“The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pre...”

“No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.”

“Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.”

“What is reading but silent conversation.”

“When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.”

“Cats ask plainly for what they want.”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prov...”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”

“People don't always need a name.”

“I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having.”

“Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rocklike a sculptor's hunk of Italian marble: Whack itand you might get either your first glimpse of ...”

“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feela hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of tho...”

“There is a rest that comes when you live out of your sound. Silence is no longer something to be avoided. It signifies a soul at rest.”

“All right, Nico relented. Maybe a little He managed to take off his aviator jacket and wad it into a pillow before he keeled over and began to snore.”