The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

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.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.

But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.