“I wanted, as all men do, to belong. To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.”

“It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.”

“Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.”

“General Grant had a simple childlike recipe for meeting life ... "I am terribly afraid but the other fellow is afraid too."”

“If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders how is all life to become important to him?”

“Interest in the lives of others the high evaluation of these lives what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself the value he attributes to his own being?”

“What is to be got at to make the air sweet the ground good under the feet can only be got at by failure trial again and again and again failure.”

“To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.”

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

“There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.”

“The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions...”