timeliness is an enemy to art.

Songs are usually unfit for whistling - indeed, whistling (except to the person doing it) is unbearable.

Fingers get habits - have memories of their own.

I love old moons. There is something humanized about them they are dulled a little, and rich in color. One can stare all night at an old moon.

What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess!

November at its best - with a sort of delightful menace in the air.

The thing one resents about winter is its inactivity the perpetual sameness of ice-armored hills and snow-blanketed woods. Great things, of course, may be going on underneath but nature wears a mask, is icily non-committal.

the breeze brought us a faint sound, as of a distant rat, a huge and mystic rat, gnawing, maybe, at the horizon!

A farm is like a very large and extended baby. It takes a great deal of time and very little mentality.

How different a loved and familiar spot appears, when viewed with the eye of probable guests.

My field-mouse had made a set of brand-new tracks here and there they etched themselves, following the brown flowers. It seemed as if uncommon spirits had seized their little maker, for sometimes he had leaped a yard, the festive mite! There was no other track pursuing the leaps must have been mere joy.

a sarcastic expression, on a beast, is far more sinister than rage.

But I shall like my battle. This sort of day puts one in mood for it. Plenty of wood in the shed, jam and potatoes and apples in the cellar, hay and oats and Cressy in the barn. Pooh - what is winter?