I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

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.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.

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.