I resolved to preempt a place in the history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold.

I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and man in the West.

Expression was always elliptical with her; and I shall never know how keenly she suffered during those days of preparation.

Sister Zuhl came back from Paris not to paint or model but to be married. She is definitely committed to another man.

By conforming I had become as much a part of the scene as Sir Walter or the waiter who shifted my plates and filled my glass.

As I bought this ring Zulime's girlish delight in it touched as well as instructed me. … Whenever I look at that poor little jewel now I experience a curious mingling of shame and regret.

This trip to Indian Territory turned out to be a very important event in my life. … I went back to Wisconsin filled with a fierce desire to own some of that beautiful prairie over which we had ridden.

I could not rid myself of a feeling that my mother was in her room, and that she might at any moment cough, or stir, or call to me. … Realizing with appalling force that so far as my philosophy went our separation was eternal, I nevertheless hoped that her spirit was with us at that moment, I did not know it—I desired it.

To attempt to recover the spirit of my youth would not only have been a failure but a bore—even to those who were urging me to the task.

As a bitter agnostic as well as a tender humorist Mark Twain loomed larger in my horizon after that night. … He was an elemental western American—with many of the faults and all of the excellencies of the border.

The coming of this child changed the universe for me. … With that tiny woman in my arms I looked into the faces of my fellow men with a sudden realization that the world as it stands to-day is essentially a male world—a world in which the female is but a subservient partner.

This experience enables me to understand the unhappiness which comes to so many homes, in which the children are only boarders, foundlings in the care of nurses and governesses.

My power of concentration was lessening. Noises irritated me and little things distracted me.

Measured by material things, his imagination had proved enormously more potent than mine.

Perhaps we can eat our Thanksgiving dinner in the restored dining-room.

Tears misted his eyes as I uttered the line, “But now we are aged and gray, Maggie, the trials of life are nearly done,” and at the close he was silent with emotion.

The community which seemed so stable to me thirty years ago, has vanished like a wisp of sunrise fog. … My sunset World—all of it—is in process of change, of disintegration, of dissolution.