A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

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 waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Borrowed illusions are better than none.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.