My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

the occasional cries of a lost loon, strayed from its flock in northern migration, fill the swamp with sounds of wailing.

What was money that it should make such dreadful things of men and women?

I don't so much mind the falling, but I do seem to select the hardest spots to light on.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

I know men and women. An honourable man is an honourable man, and a liar is a liar; both are born and not made. One cannot change to the other any more than that same old leopard can change its spots. After a man tells a woman the first untruth of that sort, the others come piling thick, fast, and mountain high.

The Cardinal ... It was as if a pulsing heart of flame passed by when he came winging through the orchard.