If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.

When any man accumulates more than he can earn with his own hands, he begins to enrich himself at the expense of the youth, the sweat, the blood, the joy of his fellow men.

no one in the whole world knows all a man's bignesses and all his littlenesses as his wife does.

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.

It really seems as if failure and hardship make more of a human being of folks than success.

it takes the very wisest person there is to know when to talk, and when to keep still.