The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Look at my papa here; he’s been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent.
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
I don’t want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Oh, that’s the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac’s own estimate, one has lived in vain.
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.