Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. – Herman Melville
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass. – Herman Melville
Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. – Herman Melville
California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life… its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. – J.B. Priestley