It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.