When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

The men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man's getting's tongue ready; an' when he outs wi' his speech at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'.

It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.