Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books … . On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

Introspection is a devouring monster.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island – it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today – and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

It would be unwise to condemn as irrational the practice of devouring the heart and liver of an adversary while yet warm. For the highest spiritual working one must choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force; a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory.

And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures