Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.