It’s difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn’t time for bad writing in a short story.
She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind.
That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.
A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can’t play tragedy while you’re living it.
It is given to very few women to know the beauty of a man’s real friendship.
Some day the marriageable age for women will be advanced from twenty to thirty, and the old maid line will be changed from thirty to forty. When that time comes there will be surprisingly few divorces. The husband of whom we dream at twenty is not at all the type of man who attracts us at thirty.
But best of all, the fascination of the People I’d Like to Know. They pop up now and then in the shifting crowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them a vague regret. Sometimes I call them the People I’d Like to Know and sometimes I call them the People I Know I’d Like, but it means much the same. Their faces flash by in the crowd, and are gone, but I recognize them instantly as belonging to my beloved circle of unknown friends.
Think of the rotten time Alice would have had in Wonderland if she hadn’t been broad-minded. Take it as it comes.
You can run, but what are you running from? Your life? You can’t run away from your life.
America – rather, the United States – seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures. Its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.
Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.
A woman can look both moral and exciting – if she also looks as if it were quite a struggle.′ quoted in Reader’s Digest interview in 1954.
Jane Austen. Anyway, I’m not.
And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and crash of the great river whose flood had caught them land shaken them and brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time.
You just go until you come to a closed door. And you say “Open Sesame!” and there you are.
The railroad they built yonder wasn’t even a decent road, but they’d been granted all that land by a rotten Congress that they’d bought up – land on both sides of the tracks for miles and miles, east and west. That’s what they were after, you see. They got all that land along the right of way – hundreds of thousands of acres – and it never cost them a cent of their own money.
No sooner do you get a field cleared of them than within another year a new layer has somehow worked its way to the surface. It’s my opinion they boil up from hell, those stones, cooling on the way.
You just look upon life as an annoying interruption to ranching.
What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn’t done to you already!
Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People – all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth – growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to – to make.
The room was in almost comic disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag, it was plain, had won.