Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.