When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.

At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest, and highest, and I came against the solid wall of the well-fed, well-dressed world - the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness. ... How I pinched, and scraped, and starved myself, to save enough to come to college! Every cent of the tuition fee I paid was drops of sweat and blood from underpaid laundry work. And what did I get for it? A crushed spirit, a broken heart, a stinging sense of poverty that I never felt before.

The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.

I was so obsessed and consumed with my grievances that I could not get away from myself and think things out in the light. I was in the grip of that blinding, destructive, terrible thing -- righteous indignation.

Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse.

The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in flight is in us all.

The real thing creates its own poetry.