Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

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.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!