In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.

...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

A writer wastes nothing.

the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.