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

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

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

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.

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.

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