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.

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.

we know by the odour that occasionally we are visited by skunks, which are not poetic but very beautiful.

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.

But Aunt Margaret doesn't like boys," objected Elnora. "Well, she likes me, and I used to be a boy.

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

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.