“A great many men are kept out of the kingdom of God because they are looking for somebody else’s experience—the experience their grandmother had, their aunt, or some one in the family.”

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.”

“An oldtimer is a person who's had many interesting experiences, some of them true.”

“Too many men have died in the name of old age. I know, because my grandmother was one of them.”

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

“I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”