Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.

It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.

The duty we owe ourselves is greater than that we owe others.

It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.

Love scenes, if genuine, are indescribable; for to those who have enacted them the most elaborate description seems tame, and to those who have not, the simplest picture seems overdone.

I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. (Jo March)