“Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.”

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

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.

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.

Her delicate breasts shake his enormous apparatus in elaborate worship.

Love is knowing that she is delicate and not breaking her still.

Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight; With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white, And taper fingers catching at all things, To bind them all about with tiny rings.

The trust to hold what is delicate within you should only be given to someone whose hands are as gentle as your heart.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

A tiny bit of obscure delicacy written all over her face at all times.

Rain is the warm softness of a mother’s hand as she soothingly dabs that nasty smelling ointment on that bruised kneecap of yours, her delicate features creased with worry.