Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

taking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandonded her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropial flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fantasy.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust." And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

...one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.