Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.