“The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”

“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.”

“If any class deserves to be protected and assisted by the government, it is the class who are banished from their native land in search of the bare means of subsistence" Charles dickens, american notes”

“all of our trials are caused by restlessness, the refusal to accept the fact that limitations exist”

“the country of the poor can be abandoned no longer. For i dread what is growing in that country now. I fear we shall reap a venomous crop”

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”