And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow