How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.