It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.