Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

Water is the true wealth in a dry land.

If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.