my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

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.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.