Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.