when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.