It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

A literary woman's best critic is her husband.

... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.

It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress.