Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival.

...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.