marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

. . . 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.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.