If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.