But however happy you are feeling, you can't talk with your mouth full of snow.

And that's why, when they want to get rid of anyone, they usually bring him down here (like they were doing with me) and say they'll leave him to the ghosts. But I always wondered if they didn't really drown 'em or cut their throats. I never quite believed in the ghosts. But those two cowards you've just shot believed all right. They were more scared of taking me to my death than I was of going.

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble--delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.

An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary