A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one. — Willa Cather

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in."

Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.