The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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.
To fulfil the dreams of one’s youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.