I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.