The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.