the occasional cries of a lost loon, strayed from its flock in northern migration, fill the swamp with sounds of wailing.

If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.

How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows.

I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.

You cannot write on the heart of another what you do not feel yourself.

Nature can be trusted to work her own miracle in the heart of any man whose daily task keeps him alone among her sights, sounds and silences.

Be sure that you are right; and then go ahead.

Nature always levies her tribute.

The seasons run with swift feet.

there was nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly used.

In the economy of nature nothing is ever lost. I cannot belive that the soul of man shall prove the one exception

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

There is no greater power and support you can give someone than to look them in the eye, and with sincerity/conviction say, 'I believe in you.

We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.

Could I write all, the world would turn to stone.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more.

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.

Examples of human stupidity. Blasphemy in Pakistan can now include spelling errors by children or throwing away a card bearing the name "Muhammad".