the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

Every crucial experience can be regarded as a setback - or a start of a new kind of development. [You have the responsibility to decide if you will see it as a bad setback or good start!]

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.