There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

. . . 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.