We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.

the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.