“Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?”

“A woman has no right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a man’s life any more than a man would have the right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a woman’s life.”

“The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life.”

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.”

“Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaenously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences. … Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.”

“There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.”

“Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!”

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.
And I the eye of the storm.”

“No one of the rocks seems to call me now, nor any of the distant mountains. Surely this Merced and Tuolumne chapter of my life is done.”