Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

...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.

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

Youth is always an enemy to the old.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

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

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.