Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes Is the deed ever truly done For Heaven and the future's sakes

Something sinister in the tone Told me my secret must be known: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad, Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.