I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings. - Walt Whitman

O LIVING always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am
content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn
and look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses
behind.

Of the human form especially, it is so great it must never be made ridiculous . . . Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology.

We carry our fresh air with us, wherever we go. He who has it, has it anywhere — nothing can rob him of it. I find in all characters that live close to nature, capriciousness, variability — they seem to pattern after nature’s higher rules. The children are that way, and dogs, cats — not but that their perceptions, intuitions, are keen enough, but with the capricious, too.