As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

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.

'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...)

All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.

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