It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.

Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.

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.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.