You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.