Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.

If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?

Sweet souls around us watch us still, press nearer to our side; Into our thoughts, into our prayers, with gentle helpings glide.

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of.