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

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

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.

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

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.

How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows.

I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.