"I want to write a great book — I want to make a difference — I want to have adventures and take enormous risks and be everything they say we are and not give a damn what anyone says."

"The Cornell University Library Lafayette Collection"

"The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known."

"What we tried to do, out of mutual loneliness, was make more out of the relationship than it could support. Then it becomes pretend, and you are both saying things cribbed from half-forgotten books an…"

"In the present crisis it has not been possible to secure the peace of Europe: because there has been little time, and there has been a disposition—at any rate in some quarters on which I will not dwel…"