“To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

Promise me one thing: don’t take me home until I’m drunk – very drunk indeed.

Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

Perfect love is rare indeed.

To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real power.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

Our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.

When God is our strength, it is strength indeed; when our strength is our own, it is only weakness.