Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.