there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!