replied my stepfather with didactic peremptoriness

Possible basis for my weltanschauung. That the childishness is never lost, but adulthood put like a veneer over it.

If it is pleasant for a time, it is unpleasant eventually by our having to leave it soon, or by invidious comparison which all humans make with something better.

The lineaments of my face establish themselves in handsome sanity and complacency: inside is labefaction and imminent death.

How prosaic to relate this experience, these importunate, irrevocable, ineluctable facts!

God showed a ribald sense of humor when he created the physical body.

a discarded but upright Christmas tree that sits in a corner of the little lawn in my court. The chiaroscuro of its branches half covered with snow suggest the pen lines of an artist

Happy just as I was at nineteen. My brain is a tabula rasa—and life excites me.

I am a coruscating pinwheel of delight

Ideals wear away, and a mistress apart from home making wife becomes the most pleasant, salubrious, invigorating arrangement