One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

The worst government is the most moral.

As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.