Secrets are generally terrible. Beauty is not often hidden — only ugliness and deformity.

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

I like to hear a storm at night. It is so cosy to snuggle down among the blankets and feel that it can't get at you.

Walter's eyes were very wonderful. All the joy and sorrow and laughter and loyalty and aspirations of many generations lying under the sod looked out of their dark-gray depths.

There are a great many people who do not understand things so there is no use in telling them.

No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.