I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.

If it doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.