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.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.