There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.

Women are so enigmatical - some in everything - all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

Perhaps, she says (Madame de la Rougierre), Other souls than human are sometimes born into the world & clothed in human flesh.

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine.