Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.

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

We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

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