I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered – about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.
One is best in one’s own country.
I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races.
To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal...
I was thinking”, he answered absently, “about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.
We must rest, he told himself, on our confidence in His design. Design was clear enough in the stars, the seasons, in the woods and fields. But in human affairs – ? Perhaps our bewilderment came from a fault in our perceptions; we could never see what was behind the next turn of the road.
But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else. Or how.
But she’s the kind that won’t be downed easily. She’ll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning.
The prayers of all good people are good.
Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself – except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.
Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may even be pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.
There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.
And what I like best in you is this particular enthusiasm, which is not at all practical or sensible, which is downright Quixotic. You are not altogether what you seem, and you have your reservations. Living among the wolves, you have not become one.
Success is never so interesting as struggle.