(Your literature is) all such truth – truth to life; everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph. I did imagine that everything had been said about life at sea that could be said – but no matter, it was all a failure and lies, nothing but lies with a thin varnish of fact – only you have stated it as it absolutely is.

I have known … men as truthful, but not so promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was not stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and everything that was in him.

I was never more confounded than by the discrepancy existing between my own observations and those displayed here, the beauty and peace and charm to be found in everything … Perhaps, as I now thought, life as I saw it, the darker phases, was never to be written about … I read and read, but all I could gather was that I had no such tales to tell, and however much I tried, I could not think of any.

The art of depicting nature as seen by toads.