A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.

A lean sorrow is hardest to bear.

Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.

Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

the mysterious moment of death proves to be a moment of waking. How one longs to take it for one's self!

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.