The past is never where you think you left it.
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.
I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.
God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.
...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched...
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
You waste life when you waste good food.
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
[From Flowering Judas] She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.
[From Old Mortality] The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.
[From The Old Order] The Grandmother always treated her animal friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamorphosed . . .
[From Old Mortality] ...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. “Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…
[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider] The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .
[From The Jilting of Granny Weatherall] You waste life when you waste good food.
The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.
She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
