I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.