Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.