Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.

We must have hope or starve to death.

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

She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman.

the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself