The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.