Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

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.

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

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

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

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

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

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

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

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

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

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.