The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.

...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.