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

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

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

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.