Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

Caddy smelled like trees.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat