to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

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.

. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.

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