I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

there's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.