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.

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

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

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'