To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another.

The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

Very well, then, where do we arrive? Where do we arrive with our respect, our homage, our filial affection? At Adam! At Adam, every time. We can't build a monument to a germ, but we can build one to Adam, who is in the way to turn myth in in fifty years and be entirely forgotten in two hundred. We can build a monument and save his name to the world forever, and we'll do it!