“Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.”

By rights you’re a king. If I was you, I’d call for a new deal.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it.

Women’s weapon, water-drops.

When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!

The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.

It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life.

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow’s grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

Music is the universal language of mankind.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.

I die for speaking the language of the angels.

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.