I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?

A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

I wish I had done everything on earth with you

I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.