Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

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

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.