Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.