Quote collection
240 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton."
"The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky."
"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."
"Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember."
"The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire."
"The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart."
"[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists."
"Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort."
"Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer."
"Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar."
"A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves."
"Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement."
"The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter."
"It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?"
"When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open."
"In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever."
"Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation."
"Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together."
"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."
"The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not."