The world is full of happy people but no one ever hears of them. You have to fight and make a scandal to get in the papers. No one knows about all the happy people.

The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.

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

I do not believe there is any one study that can be taken up that will broaden the imagination, that will be the source from which will spring more deep thinking and sincere research than the study of astronomy.

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

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be...gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier...it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book.

I do not know why it is the fate of the world always to want something different from what life gives them.