Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.