Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . .

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.