One observed a number of discordant features - a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness.

His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering.

Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because y…

It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impa…

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and unde…

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, m…