People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

I might give my life for a friend, but he'd better not ask me to do up a parcel.

When people talk of Ghosts I don't mention the Apparition by which I am haunted, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, which lurks in the plate glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors

They say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?