Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put us in an impossible situation.

'Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.'

The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.

'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.'

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