The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.

Too much information is rather deadening.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

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