the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

I sometimes think it's a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.

But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power, that they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.

Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.