The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.