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

Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane.

Love is the light that you see by.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you’ve got to dream a garden.

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

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.

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.

Wall Street is one big turf war. By benefiting one person you are disadvantaging another person.

Tension, especially with regard to horror, is a very difficult thing to sustain in the big sense.

Not that i had a big arse but even that was toned.

Unless you’re God, you are never too “big” to be a fan.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

Making a big commercial movie is hard when you think about how many of them flop.

Tempo … now there’s a big word.

All my life the only thing I’ve been good at has been climbing and throwing myself off big things.