To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.