I am an incorrigible devotee to solitude, and am never so cheerful, I believe, or so unruffled by small difficulties as when I'm alone. There's a sort of obligation to be polite and pleasant to yourself when nobody else is round.

I tried the plan of talking incessantly myself, so as to hide the fact I didn't hear anything they said, the result was nobody paid the slightest attention to my (doubtless brilliant) remarks.

But I should like to take these things on full gallop, instead of dawdling along gaping at them. I get fearfully tired, and a very little Abbey goes a long way with me.

... the fact that the idea don't come freshly on us makes it necessary for it to be better in order to be good at all. The first rose must have driven the first smeller perfectly wild, but every rose since has smelt just as well.

I am an incorrigible devotee to solitude, and am never so cheerful, I believe, or so unruffled by small difficulties as when I'm alone. There's a sort of obligation to be polite and pleasant to yourself when nobody else is round.

Now, in this town, you have to putter over a thing, even the slightest, a month. The powers that evolved the cabbage apple-pie in the morning, and executed it in the evening, are here unknown quantities.

How little we realize things till they come upon us personally. I believe I have been a perfect fiend of indifference, even intolerance, of deaf people, and now it's me. Well, I am determined to become the most Delightful Deaf Old Lady that ever existed and I am practicing to that end.