Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things. - Jack London

The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.

I could never live out completely one full experience, one point of consciousness in time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may be called, were rhymeless and reasonless.

Infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself — navigation, mathematics, science, literature and what not. And history tells of opportunity that came to the slaves who rose to the purple. No man makes opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it came to them.