Letter to Isham Reavis (5 November 1855)
1850s
Context: If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.... Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
“I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living.”
Letter to Robert Bridges (18 October 1882)
Letters, etc
Context: I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
Quote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, October 1923; as quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, Roxana Robinson, University Press of New England, 1999
1917 - 1929
Context: I have been thinking of what you say about form... I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown.... and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he want to put it down - clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand... Making the unknown known.... if you stop to think of form as form you are lost.
Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. IX).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I can not express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but as my own being; so, don't talk of our separation again - it is impracticable.
Autobiography (1802–1807), passage on events of April 6, 1776, The Founding Fathers: John Adams: A Biography in his own Words https://web.archive.org/web/20111029143754/http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps2.htm (1973), by James Bishop Peabody, Newsweek, New York, p. 197
1800s
“Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.”
Source: Bluebeard (1987), p. 82
Source: Lioness of Africa, 23 January 2020 https://www.lionessesofafrica.com/blog/2017/4/13/quote-of-the-day
