Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

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

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.