There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.

One realizes that 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. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.