Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.

Good deeds never go unpunished.

Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.