“ When I look upon men as they average and see the perfect nonchalance with which they commit this, that, or the other abuse from which I would recoil with utter repugnance, I wonder if, after all, they are not really to be envied. ”

“ If my reading and observation have not been in the wrong direction, much of the phenomenon which is called insanity is really over-sensitiveness. It is often hinted, and sometimes openly declared, that I am a madman. Perhaps I am; but I doubt it. Insanity may be self-hiding. An insane man may be the only person on earth who is not aware of his insanity. ”

“ But I believe myself a rational being. That, though, may be proof of my insanity. Yet I doubt if any insane person could study and analyze himself as I have done and still do. I am simply out of tune with the majority of my race. I do not enter into man's common pleasures, because they disgust me and would destroy me. Society hurts me, and I keep out of it. Women court me, and for my safety I avoid them. Were I a poet, I should be praised for saying these things in verse ”

“ With me the thought, or rather the dread, that I may some day so far forget myself as to debase and degrade myself, according to the common custom of man, is in itself sufficient cause for the most excruciating torture. ”

“ I meet some man with a fine face and fine manner, and believe in the sincerity of his smile. Just as I begin to feel certain of his lasting love and fidelity, I detect him in some act of treachery, or overhear him calling me a fool, or worse. ”

“ Much as I despise the gross, sensual creatures who wear the form and receive the appellation of man, I sometimes regret that I am not more like them, and, so, more at ease. They plunge into excesses with no more concern than a duck feels in plunging into a lake. ”

“ It is true that in winter our storms have an unconscionable way of disregarding degrees of latitude and sweepimg their snow-whirls to the parallel of Timbuctoo, without the least deference to Old-World precedents ”

“ In fourteen counties of Western Texas the drought has thus far lasted eighteen months, and is so far from showing signs of subsidence that hundreds of families are moving East in the hope of "regaining a country where it rains, anyhow, once a year. ”

“ No other country of half that size has enjoyed an equal exemption from volcanic disturbances. The east end of the Czar's domain is a very hot-bed of plutonic fires, Kamchatka and the Aleutian Islands being studded with active volcanoes. ”