"No dreams of a sea-green palace, with an Undine in wavy hair, and a big brother with fan-coral plumes, who afterwards turned into a sea-dog?"
"No,—I cut the late suppers you tempt me with, and preserve my digestion."
"A great mistake! One good dream in a nightmare will give you more poetical ideas than you can paint in a month: I mean a reasonable nightmare, that you can ride,—not one that rides you. The imagination then seems to scintillate nothing but beautiful images."
"I don't care to become a red-hot iron for the sake of seeing the sparks I might radiate."
"Prosaic again! Now sin and sorrow have their advantages; the law of compensation, you see. Poets, according to Shelley, learn in suffering what they teach in song. And if novelists were always scrupulous, what do you think they would write? Only milk-and-water proprieties, tamely-virtuous platitudes. Do you think Dickens never saw a taproom or a thief's den?—or that Thackeray is unacquainted with the "Cave of Harmony"? No,—all the piquancy of life comes from the slight soupçon of wickedness wherewithal we season it."
"I like amazingly to have you wander off in this way; you are always entertaining, whether your ethics are sound or not."
"Don't trouble yourself about ethics. You and I are artists; we want effects, contrasts; we must have our enthusiasms, our raptures, and our despair."
"You ride a theory well."
"Now, my dear Greenleaf, listen. Kindly I say it, but you are a trifle too innocent, too placid,—in short, too youthful. To paint, you must be intense; to be intense, you must feel; and—you see I come back on the sweep of the circle—to feel, one must have incentives, objects."
"So, you will roast your own liver to make a pâté."