quotes from classic

Indifference may not wreck a man's life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run.

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I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

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There is a passion for perfection which you will rarely see fully developed; but you may note this fact, that in successful lives it is never wholly lacking.

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Life is mostly froth and bubble,

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Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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

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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

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

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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

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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.

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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

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