... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

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.

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.

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.