How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife – beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Too much information is rather deadening.
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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.
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.
When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.
A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.