Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things. - Willa Cather

"The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love" — in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets."

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.