I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

And then there is Cate Blanchett. She is different all the time.

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck. Tom, I am not everybody.

I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

You cannot trust your eyes, if your imagination is out of focus.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains -- chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment -- in a word, Circumstance -- and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

Man is the reasoning animal. Such is the claim.

As regards his health--and the rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

Jane Austen makes me detest all her characters, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her characters up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worthwhile, too. Some day I might examine the other end of her books and see.