I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Nothing is impossible no matter how improbable, all things can be done before the rising sun!

I no longer cared about survival - I merely loved.

... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

You can't hate yourself happy, You can't criticize yourself thin, You can't shame yourself wealthy. Real change begins with self-love and self care.

Violence among all people is based on dissatisfaction, frustration and crushed ambition and people who don't know who to strike at and who to blame, and not willing to blame themselves.

What is strong and rigid is snapped and laid low. What is flexible and soft will always prevail.

Only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors.