Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.