“Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.”

I understood….that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves — they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

Remember well, and bear in mind, a constant friend is hard to find.

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I’ll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.

This earthly life is a battle,’ said Ma. ‘If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. … The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.

Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

When I began to rap, I wasn’t taking it real serious. As I start seeing good things, it’s getting serious.

When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

So valuable to heaven is the dignity of the human soul that every member of the human race has a guardian angel from the moment the person begins to be.

In dreams begin responsibilitiy.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.