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

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

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.

marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.