“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”

“And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.”

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

“What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.”

“The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.”

“I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time”

“Are we not like that actor of old time,
Who wore his mask so long his face took
Its likeness?”

“To what is good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and wilful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness.”

“He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.”

“The timid temper lives in perpetual terror, the nobler one braces itself to endure when ever the appointed time shall come.”