We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.
The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore.
I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested.
I am aware that I am very old now; but I am also aware that I have never been so young as I am now, in spirit, since I was fourteen and entertained Jim Wolf with the wasps. I am only able to perceive that I am old by a mental process; I am altogether unable to feel old in spirit. It is a pity, too, for my lapses from gravity must surely often be a reproach to me. When I am in the company of very young people I always feel that I am one of them, and they probably privately resent it.
Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.
I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.
There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. When you make a decision to "be" a particular way, you can count on change and external circumstances to come along which will challenge that decision. Remain vigilant after declaring a major decision and manage yourself in relationship to the goal. Set up structures that support you staying on target.
Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.