Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

A favorite means of escaping the solution to any problem is to declare it too complex for solution. This absolves us from attempting solution. ... Any problem is too complex to solve when we do not wish to accept the conditions of solution. Solution is possible where acceptance is ready.

Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.

you seem to grieve for what is not so ... and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.