And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether!
As for affectation - I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary affectation the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in its essence.
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
However - I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume from my letters.
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect - but I don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again.
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
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