I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

When you've won the war, you're faced with the problem of winning the peace.

When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith.

Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

America in the 1800s isn't quite the historical mystery hotbed as the same period in the country it bested in the War of Independence, but its unique spectacle of rapid social change and the lingering influence of its literary voices act in a parallel manner upon crime fiction chroniclers devoted to this side of the Atlantic.