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

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

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

. . . 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.

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