 The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. |
| What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. |
| The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. |
| I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. |
| The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. |
| Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. |
| The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter. |
| The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand. |
| To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies. |
| Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything. |
| Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves. |
| It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of. |
| No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. |
| Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact. |
