Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

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

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.