There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the pat…

Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said l…

Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.

In your teens and your 20s, you're immortal, you're untouchable. It's only later that you begin to realize you are mortal. (2004)

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.