But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

. . . 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.

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

...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.

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