Martin Eden

Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

He has no conscience. That alone will make him great.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned, and they were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a university education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life.

This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was vouchsafed her. If it was not love, it was too shameful.

He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.

What was the matter with them? What had they done with their educations? They had had access to the same books he had. How did it happen that they had drawn nothing from them?

You try to write, but you don't succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I know what you write. I can see it with half an eye, and there's one ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines. It's guts, and magazines have no use for that particular commodity. What they want is wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not from you.

The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he read.

Get up early, then, an’ do it first. I won’t start out till ten o’clock." He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.