You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.