If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.

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

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.