The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.