Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.