There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.

What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.

I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

‎The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundereds of times when I dont realize it. You really are a part of me.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days...

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world

Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.

I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.

And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.

There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

Language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away. But the most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.