Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence.

Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears.

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.

Imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind.

... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.