“Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior’s] speech. Not an insignificant “have went” nor an infinitesimal”

Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.

Biggest affirmative argument I know in favor of ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ is just the way you feel inside you that nothin’ can stop you from livin’ on.

I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain’t. So the results of man’s labor will never be equal.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.

You wouldn’t think that sorrow could be a light, would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.

They are the most painful tears in the world … the tears of the aged … for they come from dried beds where the emotions have long burned low.

When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.

Things last so much longer than people.

For though love has been ridiculed and disgraced, exchanged and bartered, dragged through the courts, and sold for thirty pieces of silver, the bright, steady glow of its fire still shines on the hearth-stones of countless homes.

not all clever words are true. … And inversely most things that are true are not clever.

The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.

What you run away from owns you. You are the dog on a leash. The most you can do is to tug against the leash.

Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he’ll look at you as if you were a hummingbird.

Nothing that rest on some contradictory basis shall succeed or last in the long run (“ne saurait réussir ou durer, à la longue”, Fr.); all that involve (or imply…) a contradiction is fatally destined, early or late, to disintegrate and disappear.

You need people with brain and heart and soul that give it all. You need young people on skateboards and you need people running around making noise.

I love lawyers and bankers, they are my family, but I don’t want to live with them. It doesn’t make a city.

Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.