'The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.'

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

'Daddy, how many whoppers are there in those tall trees?' After waking up in the car while driving through Calaveras Big Trees and hearing daddy say, 'Wow, that's a whopper of a tree.'

When you have snowflakes in the clouds in the sky and you have mountains, you get snow. That's how it works.

'I'm not beautiful, I'm pretty!' (Angrily at age 2 and a half. After getting into his sister's toy makeup case and being called beautiful...)