The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.