. . . 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.

So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

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.

I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

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