Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

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

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?