To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be...gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier...it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book.

it takes the very wisest person there is to know when to talk, and when to keep still.

no one in the whole world knows all a man's bignesses and all his littlenesses as his wife does.

It really seems as if failure and hardship make more of a human being of folks than success.

there was nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly used.

I do not know why it is the fate of the world always to want something different from what life gives them.

Being dead was one thing, getting ready for a wedding another.