I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.

Too much information is rather deadening.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.

Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.