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

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.