There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.

Maternal love, like an orange tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once. When a woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of her baby and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very heartstrings, she is born again with her newborn child.

If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself.

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.

Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.

To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.