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.

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

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

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.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.