An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.