Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Borrowed illusions are better than none.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.