My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.