I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

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.

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 thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.