I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.
Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.
There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.
But youth isn’t happy. Youth is sadder than age.
No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.
Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing...
I haven’t much opinion of words. They’re apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that’s what I say.
The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization...
I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.
Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.
The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.
The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.
What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.
In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!
Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.