In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

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

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.