"I have a great deal of what the world calls courage, but I have no prudence."

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human integrity has been ruined by the fall, and that I am a member of the ruined species."

"It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity o…"

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."

"I am constitutionally nervous—high-strung. I have a morbid dread of solitude."