All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

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

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

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