The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs. - Thornton Wilder

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.