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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

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

Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.