The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.