19 quotes found
“My pen shall heal, not hurt.”
“He was so lonely that he laughed at himself.”
“No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.”
“Satirize wickedness if you must--but pity weakness.”
“There isn't any such thing as an ordinary life. (92)”
“I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art.”
“Fear is a vile thing, and is at the bottom of almost every wrong and hatred of the world.”
“Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)”
“Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth”
“It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dul...”
“Lovely thoughts came flying to meet me like birds. They weren't my thoughts. I couldn't think anything half so exquisite. They came from somewhere.”
“A woman who has a sense of humor possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any o...”
“[Ilse] was suffering so keenly that she wanted to arraign the universe at the bar of her pain.”
“Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out h...”
“Oh, as Dean says, nobody is free - never, except just for a few brief moments now and then, when the flash comes, or when as on my haystack night, the soul slips over into eternity for a little spa...”
“Cousin Jimmy thinks I did perfectly right. Cousin Jimmy would think I had done perfectly right if I had murdered Andrew and buried him in the Land of Uprightness. It's very nice to have one friend ...”
“I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--...”
“Jimmy Murray, you are an ass,' said Aunt Ruth, angrily.'Well, we're cousins,' agreed Cousin Jimmy pleasantly.”
“Well, it all comes to this, there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to live in our own.”