Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.

Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.