Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.

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