in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy.

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.

... happy husbands and wives can hear each other say the same thing over and over again without being tired.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.