Rabbits are a foolish people. They do not fight except with their own kind, nor use their paws except for feet, and appear to have no reason for existence but to furnish meals for meat-eaters. In flight they seem to rebound from the earth of their own elasticity, but keep a sober pace going to the spring. It is the young watercress that tempts them and the pleasures of society, for they seldom drink.

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. ... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do.

I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers.

To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water - there is no help for any of these things.

I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas