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.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

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 emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.