our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.

through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth

In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.