People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

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

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?