Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

Every past is worth condemning.

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.

The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

World peace begins with inner peace.

God will pardon: That's His business.

Go on with a spirit that fears nothing.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

To have more, we must first become more.

When you have an inconsistent season, you learn a lot about yourself and your pitching.

I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.