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

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

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.

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.

Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.