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

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

Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.

There are some who possess the magic touch, the infectious spirit of enthusiasm; who have the same effect as a beautiful morning that never reaches noon. Under this spell one's mind is braced, one's spirit recreated; one is ready for any adventure, even if it only be the doing of the next distasteful task light-heartedly.

Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!

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