It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

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

Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.

you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.