"Such a person doesn't always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I'm good for something, even so! I feel I have a raison d'être! I know that I could be a quite different man! For …"

"Take our sister Wil, she has neither drunk nor led a wild life, and yet we know a photograph of her in which she has the look of a madwoman."

"For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly."

"I wish they'd simply accept me as I am."

"Believe me that sometimes I laugh heartily because people suspect me of all kinds of malignity and absurdity, of which not a hair of my head is guilty — I, who am really no one but a friend of nature,…"