“It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person cou...”

“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoida...”

“She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...”

“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”

“I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got...”

“I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying...”

“Work will drive you crazy if you let it.”

“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

“Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is soordinary that the whi...”

“When man will return to nature, nature will return to him.”

“The sky is an enormous man.”

“When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unr...”