“There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.”

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning.

Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.

I don’t think that once you get to one level, you can relax. You’ve got to keep pushing.

Once you are labeled ‘the best’ you want to stay up there, and you can’t do it by loafing around.

You don’t have to solve every problem at once.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.