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

Self-admiration giveth much consolation.

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

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

her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so