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

Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material.

Death is not the worst sorrow.

... to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.

To exist as an advertisement of her husband's income, or her father's generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.

A literary woman's best critic is her husband.