Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
The end is nothing; the road is all.
It is cremated youth. It is all yours – no one gave it to you.
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
I’ve seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can’t help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself.
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
From the time the Englishman’s bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.