But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

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

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

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.