"As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass."

"I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people."

"Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even- a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content."

"The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor."

"Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed - nothing has happened."

"The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own."

"The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand."

"Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them."

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."

"The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it-for a little while."

"He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer."

"It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain."

"The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter."

"I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

"He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled."

"I only knew the schoolbooks said he 'died in the wilderness, of a broken heart.''More than him has done that,' said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent."

"That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

"Art it seems to me should simplify."

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."

"The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire."

"Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement."

"A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;A pungent odor from the dusty sage;A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;A breaking of the distant table-landsThrough purple mists ascending, and the flareOf water ditches silver in the light;A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;A sudden sickness for the hills of home."

"As he stood there lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant features. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself, - it was an armour he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength."

"Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke."

"Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton."

"I am enjoying to a full that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action."

"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."

"They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it."

"Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding."

"I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain."

"Prayers said by good people are always good prayers."

"In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever."

"It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another."

"Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer."

"After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only-spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind-rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring."

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great."

"The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."

"At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly."

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."

"Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen."

"The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always."